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9 


PAUL CEZANNE 
His Life and Art 


Uniform with this Volum e: 

PAUL GAUGUIN: His Life 

and Art. By John Gould Fletcher, with 
10 halftones. $2.00 




Courtesy of M. Ambroise Vollard 
SELF-PORTRAIT OF CEZANNE. A Drawing 


PAUL CEZANNE 


His Life and Art 


BY 

AMBROISE VOLLARD 

u 


AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION 
By 

HAROLD L. VAN DOREN 


WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS 

* 



NICHOLAS L. BROWN 

NEW YORK MCMXXIII 







Copyright, 1923, 


BY 

NICHOLAS L. BROWN 


HD s&3 


* 


C 33 V ^ 

/ * 

1 

Vr 



PRINTBD IN U. S. A. 

VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY 

BINSHAMTON AND NEW YORK 


JUN 20 ’23 ft 

©.C1A711109 



PUBLISHER’S NOTE 


My original intention was to have a prominent 
art critic of America write an introduction to this 
volume, but after I had carefully considered the 
idea, I decided that, for the artist and the con¬ 
noisseur, the name of Ambroise Vollard, justly 
proclaimed the Boswell of Cezanne, would be 
sufficient incentive. 

In his letter to me of July 28, 1922, M. Vol¬ 
lard asked me to mention the fact that the re¬ 
productions which appear in this volume have 
been selected by him especially for this edition 
and have never appeared elsewhere. The orig¬ 
inal photographs are the personal property of 
M. Vollard, and M. Paul Cezanne Jr. has ap¬ 
proved of the author’s choice. 

If the reader will bear in mind that Cezanne’s 
success almost wholly depended on the author of 
this book, he will have a keener interest in M. 
Vollard than as a biographer of the great French 
artist. 

The present translation by Harold L. Van 
Doren has been authorized, and the proofs have 
been revised by M. Vollard. 

Nicholas L. Brown. 


5 


✓ 


4 






CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. First Impressions (1839-1861) . . .11 

II. Paris (1861-1866).27 

III. Cezanne Aspires to the Salon of 

Bouguereau (1866-1895) .... 38 

IV. The Exhibition of the Impression¬ 

ists .54 

V. The Exhibition of 39 Rue Laffitte . 75 

VI. My Visit to Cezanne.96 

VII. Aix and Its People. 108 

VIII. Cezanne Paints My Portrait (1896- 

1899).120 

IX. The Final Return to Aix .... 142 

X. Cezanne and Zola . . . . . .154 

XI. The Last Years (1899-1906) . . . 175 

XII. Cezanne and the Critics .... 186 


7 








LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Self Portrait of Cezanne. A Draining Frontispiece 

PAGE 

A Portrait.20 

Interpretation of an Old Photograph .... 32 

Louis-Auguste Cezanne Reading (1866) ... 40 

Outdoor Scene (1870).48 

The Golden Calf.64 

Study for the “Card Players” (1892) .... 72 

Bathers Resting (about 1877) (Caillebotte Collec¬ 
tion) .84 

The Orgy.96 

The A 1 Fresco Luncheon (1878).108 

Portrait of M. Ambroise Vollard.124 

Bacchanale (1885).136 

A Portrait (about 1894).148 

Mme. Cezanne with the Green Hat (1888) . .160 

Girl with a Doll (1894).176 

Still Life (about 1902).184 


























CHAPTER I 


FIRST IMPRESSIONS 
(l839—l86l) 

Y EARS ago a family of poor folk, natives of 
Cesena, left Italy to seek their fortunes in 
France. Upon arriving in their adopted father- 
land, the Cezannes—for they had taken the 
name of their native town—established them¬ 
selves in the rustic Alpine city of Briangon, not 
far from the frontier that they just crossed. 
But fate being constantly against them, some of 
their number set out to try their luck in another 
region. Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth 
century, Louis-Auguste Cezanne, he who was to 
become the father of the painter, was born in a 
little village in the Department of Var. His 
parents were humble artisans, profoundly at¬ 
tached to their religious beliefs, and deeply re- 


11 


12 


Paul Cezanne 


spectful of ancient tradition. They had num¬ 
erous children, of whom the father of our 
Cezanne was the only survivor. To the end of 
his life, Monsieur Louis-Auguste Cezanne remem¬ 
bered his weakly childhood with nothing but 
terror. Small wonder, then, that when, by dint 
of hard work and rigid economy, the little hat¬ 
ter’s-apprentice became his own master, he had a 
loving respect for money acquired by arduous 
toil, and a profound aversion for the “precarious 
callings.” In the forefront of these callings he 
placed the painter’s craft. 

Paul Cezanne came into the world on the 19th 
of January, 1839, at Aix-en-Provence. His 
father had yet to become a banker—a noble pro¬ 
fession—the ambition of a lifetime; however, the 
affairs of the Cezanne hattery were going well, 
and Monsieur Cezanne asked for nothing better 
than to see his son established some day in one 
of those honorable professions which are so abun¬ 
dantly lucrative and redound so creditably to the 
honor of a family. But, unfortunately, an ir¬ 
resistible leaning towards painting, which was 


Paul Cezanne 


13 

to become the despair of his parents, manifested 
itself very early in young Paul Cezanne. 

Curiously enough, his first box of colors was 
given to him by his father. Pere Cezanne had 
found it among a lot of old packing cases bought 
at a bargain from some itinerant peddler; for 
Monsieur Cezanne extended the scope of his busi¬ 
ness to everything which he could dispose of at an 
honest profit. The father and the mother were 
happy to see their Paul take so readily to his 
pencil and colors—a peaceful amusement, which 
helped to calm the stormy outbursts of a per¬ 
sonality peculiarly passionate and mobile, com¬ 
pounded of ungovernable violence and an almost 
feminine impressionability. The only person 
who could manage the child was his sister Marie, 
two years his junior, with whom he went every 
day, hand in hand, to a primary school where 
girls and boys shared the same benches. 

When he was ten years of age, Paul Cezanne 
entered the boarding-school of Saint Joseph, a 
pious institution, where he learned the first ele¬ 
ments of drawing from a Spanish monk. Three 


Paul Cezanne 


H 

years later the young student was entered as a 
day-scholar at the College Bourbon, now the 
Lycee d’Aix. It was there that he met Zola, 
who was in a less advanced class. They became 
friends at once; another lad from Aix, Baptistin 
Bailie, shared their intimacy. 

Cezanne was far from being a prodigy; he ac¬ 
quired knowledge even less readily than the 
majority of children of his age; but, in spite of 
his violent and excessively sensitive nature, he 
was equally conscientious in all of his studies, 
whether the classics, of which he was particularly 
fond, or the sciences, towards which his spirit was 
decidedly rebellious. The exception to the rule 
was chemistry, and he was wont to amuse himself 
by repeating his experiments under the paternal 
roof, to the great alarm of the entire household. 

In the hours of recess, Cezanne, Zola, and 
Bailie were inseparable. During the holidays, 
they roamed the fields and the woods together. 
Their favorite haunts were the hills of Saint 
Marc and Sainte Baume, and the Tholonet dam, 
an artificial basin constructed by Zola’s father 


Paul Cezanne 


15 

upon a site whose wild grandeur had no more en¬ 
thusiastic admirers than these three young friends. 
Swimming was still one of their favorite—and 
one of their noisiest—diversions. Later, these 
amusements were augmented by pleasures of a 
new sort. Zola would read aloud and comment 
on de Musset, Hugo, and Lamartine; Bailie 
would discourse and philosophize; Cezanne, full 
of the names of the great colorists, Veronese, 
Rubens, and Rembrandt, would formulate theo¬ 
ries of art. Zola’s favorite poet was de Musset; 
and it was Musset’s verse that the young student 
chose as a model for his poetical babblings. 
Fired by his friend’s contagious enthusiasm, 
Cezanne also tried his hand at rhyme. His poetry 
has unfortunately disappeared—not a trace re¬ 
mains; but every evidence leads one to believe 
that it did not materially differ from the follow¬ 
ing lines, scribbled much later on the back of a 
sketch for the Apotheosis of Delacroix: 

Behold this young girl whose garment reveals 

Her plump, buxom form in the midst of the fields; 

Her body so supple, so splendidly blown, 


i6 


Paul Cezanne 


No serpent has ever more suppleness shown. 
The sun catches her in its luminous mesh, 
And with golden rays caresses her flesh. 1 


Cezanne was not a poet only; he aspired to 
be a musician as well. A friend, Marguery by 
name, took it into his head one day to organize 
a band at the College d’Aix. Cezanne, Bailie, 
and Zola enrolled immediately. After the aca¬ 
demic procession, the band would march triumph¬ 
antly through the city, and one might have seen 
Cezanne tooting a cornet with all his might and 
main, while Zola, with a clarinet, brought up the 
rean ' Mu became such a virtuoso that he 


obtained* the honor of playing behind the 
dais on procession days. 

Outside of school hours Cezanne pursued the 
courses in drawing and painting which were given 
at the Municipal Museum. Already he was as¬ 
tonishing his comrades by the unexpected audacity 


1 Void la jeune femme aux fesse9 rebondies! 
Comme elle etale bien au milieu des prairies; 
Son corps souple, splendide £panouissement! 

La couleuvre n’a pas de souplesse plus grande, 
Et le soleil qui luit darde complaisamment 
Quelques rayons dores sur cette belle riande. 


Paul Cezanne 


17 


of his interpretations. His dream of art was be¬ 
ginning to take shape, and his mother, in whom 
he confided his hopes and plans, was not slow 
to encourage him. 

Elizabeth Aubert, Cezanne’s mother, was born 
at Aix of a family of remote Creole origin. She 
was vivacious and romantic, carefree in spirit, but 
endowed with a disposition at once restless, pas¬ 
sionate, and quick to take offense. It was from 
her that Paul got his conception and vision of 
life. Happy at finding herself regenerated in her 
son, she pleaded in his behalf with his father. 
But, in spite of an argument which she had con¬ 
trived in her mother’s heart, and which she 
adjudged unanswerable—“His name is Paul, 
isn’t it, the same as Veronese and Rubens 4 ?”— 
it was not without anxiety that Monsieur 
Cezanne observed artistic proclivities developing 
in his son. 

A second prize in drawing brought back by 
young Paul from the Aix School of Fine Arts at 
the age of nineteen, further increased the father’s 
apprehensions. He was pained and at the same 


i8 


Paul Cezanne 


time astonished that the son of a financier (for 
Monsieur Cezanne had some years earlier realized 
his dream of becoming a banker) should take 
pleasure in such silly trash, 1( and he never tired 
of saying: <£ Young man, young man, think of 
the future! With genius you die, with money 
you live!” 2 

However, the situation had not yet become 
desperate. Paul Cezanne had pursued his classi¬ 
cal studies in spite of his great passion for paint¬ 
ing, and had succeeded in getting his degree in let¬ 
ters in the same year that he had taken his second 
prize in drawing. (The boy who took the first 
prize, and who was later to become an estimable 
local painter, never forgave Cezanne for having 
secured in the eyes of the world the place which 
he felt belonged to him as winner of the first 
prize.) But for all his violent nature, Paul 
Cezanne was quite the reverse of rebellious where 

2 Words of M. Louis-Auguste Cezanne quoted to Paul 
Cezanne by Zola in a letter published in The Correspondence 
of Emile Zol&, Early Letters, Fasquelle, 1907. All passages 
quoted in this book from Zola’s letters are likewise borrowed 
from this collection. 


Paul Cezanne 


19 

his father was concerned. He even manifested 
considerable timidity in the presence of the author 
of his days. But he suffered all the more acutely 
because of the hostility he encountered all 
about him, and perhaps would have succumbed 
to discouragement—Zola having been called away 
to be with his mother, lately widowed and settled 
in Paris—had not his friend Baptistin Bailie re¬ 
mained at Aix. Bailie, although devoted to 
algebra, discussed poetry and painting as ferv¬ 
ently as ever. 

As for Zola, he was very unhappy in Paris. 
His schoolmates at the Lycee Saint-Louis scorned 
him for his lack of worldly goods and his provin¬ 
cial manners: so he jumped at the chance 
of spending his vacation at Aix during the sum¬ 
mer of 1858, and the walks to Tholonet and Ro- 
quefavour were resumed. Cezanne, obliged to 
hide from his father’s watchful eye when he was 
busy at his painting, was only too happy to show 
his sketches to his friend. Zola told of his plans 
and read his first efforts; Bailie criticized them. 
In the end they got so worked up over literature 


20 


Paul Cezanne 


that, by the time the holidays were over, friend 
Bailie, fearing to be repudiated by his comrades 
should they find him incapable of “expressing 
himself by means of some form of art, be it paint¬ 
ing or poetry,” even talked of renouncing algebra 
to consecrate himself to rhyme. 

But Cezanne had graver preoccupations. His 
father refused to recognize painting as a serious 
vocation; nor would he acknowledge it a 
possible source of daily bread. Again Paul had 
to give in. He registered with the Law Faculty 
at Aix (1858-1859) and even passed the first 
examination without difficulty, in spite of such a 
distaste for it that, to make the task more interest¬ 
ing, he put the codes into French verse. 

Zola came back to Aix during the summer of 
1859 f° r a visit f° ur months; once more the 
three friends resumed their rambles together, their 
intimacies deepened, plans for the future took 
shape. 

The holidays over, Cezanne turned to his law 
books more reluctantly than ever, and Zola went 
back to Paris. Cezanne had visions of joining 


Courtesy of M. Ambroise Vollard 


A PORTRAIT 









Paul Cezanne 


21 


him there, but his painting master, Monsieur Gil¬ 
bert, was not going to let a pupil slip away from 
him without an effort; in that quarter, the elder 
Cezanne found unforeseen aid in holding on to 
his son. As a matter of fact, the eventuality of 
a departure for the capital worried him not a 
little, and he feared both the influence of Zola 
upon his son and the thousand and one dangers of 
Paris. Having lived there for a few years in his 
youth, he cherished the memory of a city where 
swindlers and sharpers abounded—had, in fact, 
the upper hand. Zola paid no attention to mis¬ 
givings of that sort. He had drawn up a budget 
for his friend on the basis of 125 francs a month, 
a sum which, in view of what it was to pay for, 
would surely not exceed the limits of Monsieur 
Cezanne’s generosity: 

“A room at twenty francs per month; de¬ 
jeuner eighteen sous and dinner twenty-two 
sous, making two francs a day or sixty francs 
a month; adding the twenty francs for the 
room—that makes eighty all told. Besides 
that, you have your studio class to pay for; 


22 


Paul Cezanne 


Suisse’s, one of the cheapest, costs ten francs, I 
believe. Then I should say ten francs for 
canvas, brushes and paints, which makes one 
hundred francs. That leaves you twenty-five 
francs for your laundry, light, tobacco, pocket- 
money, and all the thousand and one little 
needs that come up from day to day. But 
there are additional resources that you can 
create for yourself. Studies done in the schools, 
above all, copies made in the Louvre, sell very 
well. . . . All you have to do is to find a mar¬ 
ket, which is merely a question of looking.” 

Cezanne took up his law books dejectedly. 
But Zola in his letters did not simply confine 
himself to reiterating the inducements that Paris 
had to offer; he plunged boldly into the un¬ 
sounded seas of art. 

“We often talk poetry in our letters, but 
the words 'sculpture’ and 'painting’ seldom if 
ever crop up in them. It is a grave omisson, 
almost a crime. . . .” 

Zola had already written to Cezanne about 
Greuze: "Greuze has always been my favorite.” 


Paul Cezanne 


23 

He had confided the uneasiness stirred within 
him by an engraving of Greuze representing “a 
young peasant girl, tall and with rare beauty of 
form.” He knew not which to admire the more, 
“her willful face or her magnificent arms.” 

Another time he wrote of Ary Scheffer, “that 
painter of pure, aerial, almost diaphanous types”; 
and he profited by the opportunity to inform 
Cezanne that “poetry is a great thing; there is no 
salvation but in poetry.” 

Zola brought his letter to a close by recom¬ 
mending that his friend “work for strong and 

firm drawing —unquibus et rostro —so as not to 
become a realist, but to be a Jean Goujon or an 

Ary Scheffer.” 

And then, after having put Cezanne on his 
guard against realism, Zola pointed out another 
pitfall, one of the most perilous, namely: “com¬ 
mercialized art.” One of their old comrades had 
fallen victim to it, a chap with whom they should 
have nothing further to do. “Above all (and 
here lies the gravest danger), do not admire a 
picture because it has been done quickly; to sum 


Paul Cezanne 


24 

up in a word, do not admire and do not imitate 
a painter who has sold his art.” 

Zola so feared a like fate for his friend that he 
reverted perpetually to his favorite subject, beg¬ 
ging forbearance if he pressed needless precau¬ 
tions upon Cezanne. But “friendship alone dic¬ 
tated his words”; and besides, his ignorance of 
the painter’s craft gave him a real advantage over 
Cezanne, because, knowing at best only “how 
to distinguish black from white,” he would not 
“be tempted to bother about the technique,” 
whereas he feared that Cezanne, who knew “how 
difficult it was to place the colors just where he 
wanted them,” might in spite of himself be in¬ 
trigued into seeing only “pulverized colors ap¬ 
plied to a canvas,” and “to search constantly for 
the mechanical method by which the effect was 
obtained.” (There’s a grave danger for you!) 
But, on condition that one first placed the idea 
above everything, Zola conceded that one might 
then deign to become interested in the “rough, 
oily surface of the canvas”; in a word, one must 
know one’s business. 


Paul Cezanne 


25 


“Far be it from me to disdain form! That 
would be folly,, for, without form, one might 
be a great painter as far as oneself were con¬ 
cerned, but not for others. It is by form 
that the painter is understood, appreciated.” 

Cezanne pere was at last forced to admit his 
son’s incapacity for everything connected with 

“temporal” affairs. Yielding finally to the im¬ 
portunities of the young man and the prayers 
and lamentations of his wife, he gave his consent 
to Paul’s departure for Paris, with the secret hope 
that he would not prosper with his painting and 
that he would return to the bank. 

So at last, in 1861, Cezanne, escorted by his 
father and his sister Marie, arrived in the capital. 
All three found lodging at a hotel in Rue 
Coquilliere. After making a few calls on old ac¬ 
quaintances, the father and sister returned to Aix, 
and Paul found himself free at last, provided 
with a small credit account on the house of Le 
Hideux, the Paris correspondent of the Cezanne- 
Cabassol bank at Aix. Cabassol was a cashier 
whom Monsieur Cezanne had elevated to the 


26 


Paul Cezanne 


dignity of a partner, on account of his practical 
view of life. Instead of sowing wild oats, 
Cabassol had consecrated all his spare time, which 
he passed at the Cafe Procope (the business men’s 
rendez-vous at Aix), to a careful study of the 
credit of his fellow-townspeople. Such was the 
accuracy of his information, that, when a bor¬ 
rower would appear at the window, Monsieur 
Cezanne, in order to be assured of his solvency, 
had only to turn to the faithful Cabassol and 
inquire, “You hear what the gentleman wishes; 
have you the money in the safe?” 


CHAPTER II 


PARIS 

(l86l-l866) 

F I AHE moment he arrived in Paris, Cezanne 
rushed off to see Zola. 

‘Tve seen Paul!!! 5 ’ wrote the future author 
of U Oeuvre 1 to their mutual friend Bailie. 
£ Tve seen Paul; do you realize that"? Do you 
comprehend all the melody contained in those 
three words 4 ?” 

At that time Zola lived in Rue Saint-Victor, 
near the Pantheon. In order to be near to him, 
Cezanne rented a furnished room in Rue des 
Feuillantines. By day Zola worked at the docks 
where he had some small job, while Cezanne at- 
dended the Academie Suisse 2 * on the Ouai des 

•'V' 

1 L’Oeuvre, published by Zola in 1867, has for its central 
figure Claude Lantier, who was drawn in part from Cezanne, 
and in part from another of the group of Impressionist painters, 
Bazille, who was killed in the Franco-Prussian war. 

2 Gustave Coquiot, in his volume Cezanne (Librairie Ollen- 

dorf, Paris 1919), gives some illuminating details about the 

27 



28 


Paul Cezanne 

Orfevres. But at night without fail the two 
would meet again in Zola’s room and talk art and 
literature as in the good old days at Aix. Zola 
even posed for a portrait; but it did not “go” 
well at all, and the young painter, already quick 
to be discouraged, lost no time in destroying the 
canvas. 

“I’ve ripped it to pieces; your portrait, you 
know. I tried to work on it this morning, but 
it went from bad to worse, so I destroyed 
it ” 

But it appears that the intimacy they shared 

Academie Suisse: “Today the Academie Suisse is no more; 
it has disappeared along with the office of Sabra, the popular 
dentist, who was for a long time established at the end of Pont 
Saint-Michel. The additions to the Palais de Justice crowded 
out this picturesque corner of Paris. 

“The Academie Suisse and Sabra’s “dental parlors” were on 
the same floor, and in consequence more than one amusing mis¬ 
take occurred. It was only the patients who were offended; 
many of them fled, never to return—having opened the wrong 
door by mistake—when they found nude models shamelessly 
walking about the room. 

“The Academie Suisse was a free and easy school. Nobody 
came to give criticisms. It opened very early, about six a. m. 
in the summer; then, the afternoon class over, there was a 
period from seven to ten o’clock in the evening. Three weeks 
out of each month, there was a male model; the other week, 
a female model.” {Trans. Note) 


Paul Cezanne 


29 


was not proving as successful as they had hoped. 
In all probability their ideas about painting were 
too much at variance, and perhaps “to chat as of 
old* their pipes aglow and their cups brimming’’ 
did not strike Cezanne as the “glorious consum¬ 
mation” that Zola had imagined. In a letter 
dated 1862 Zola wrote: “Paris has not fostered 
our friendship. . . . Never mind, I shall always 
count you my friend.” 

Cezanne received this letter while at Aix. 
Weary of Paris, he had felt the need of contact 
with his native soil. A surprise was waiting for 
him there. His father, who had less faith in 
painting than ever, would not hear of Paris again, 
and took him into the bank. “Hush! my dear 
Paul, what good can painting do you? How can 
you hope to improve on what Nature has already 
done so divinely well? You must be very, very 
stupid!” 

Yielding as usual to the paternal will, Cezanne 
tried to take an interest in book-keeping. To 
break the monotony of the toil to which he was 
condemned, he covered the margins of the ledgers 


Paul Cezanne 


3° 

with sketches and rhymes. This couplet is all 
that remains: 

The banker Cezanne, with fear in his eyes, 

Sees a painter-to-be from his counter arise . 3 

Unable for long to turn a deaf ear to the whis¬ 
perings of the muse, he escaped now and then 
from the offices and repaired to the Jas de 
Bouffan, 4 where he painted vast compositions 
on the walls of one of the rooms. Four of the 
panels were so large that, for a joke, he signed 
them Ingres, and dated them “1811.” 5 

But at last came the day when his father, un¬ 
able longer to oppose such a manifest talent 
without laying himself open to the charge of 
persecution, allowed Paul to return once more 
to Paris. Cezanne was overjoyed to see his dear 
friend Zola once more. As far as he was con- 

3 Cezanne, le banquier, ne voit pas sans fremir 
Derriere son comptoir naitre un peintre a venir. 

* The Home of the Winds. A beautiful house and garden 
near Aix owned by Monsieur Cezanne. Paul Cezanne pre¬ 
ferred to work there to the end of his life. 

5 Many other compositions had been painted on the walls of 
this same room. The space being limited, Cezanne painted 
one subject over another. 


Paul Cezanne 


31 

cerned, their separation had wiped away all the 
misunderstanding and coolness of the past. He 
secured a room in Boulevard Saint-Michel, op¬ 
posite the School of Mines, attended the Academie 
Suisse once more, and became acquainted with 
Pissarro, Guillaumin, and Oiler. Through Oiler 
he made the acquaintance of Guillemet. 

Although he still maintained affectionate rela¬ 
tions with his family, they occasionally came to 
loggerheads over “this confounded painting.” 
He was impatient to take the measure of his 
talent and presented himself for the entrance ex¬ 
amination to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Pie did 
not pass. Monsieur Mottez, one of the ex¬ 
aminers, when asked to give a reason, made this 
statement: “Cezanne has the proper tempera¬ 
ment for a colorist; unfortunately his work is ex¬ 
treme.” 

After this setback, it was with some apprehen¬ 
sion that the ill-fated candidate watched the hour 
approach when he would have to return to Aix 
for his vacation. His friend Guillemet accom¬ 
panied him to plead the painter’s cause with his 


Paul Cezanne 


32 

father. But the elder Cezanne had made up his 
mind; he would never again try to turn his son 
aside from the path he had followed with such 
obstinate determination. 

After a few months spent at Aix, Paris once 
more. He rented a studio in Rue Beautreillis, 
near the Bastille. There he painted several nota¬ 
ble still-lifes, among them the Bread and Eggs , 
as well as a large study for Women Bathing in¬ 
spired by Rubens. (This is the Bathers of Zola’s 
hero Claude Lantier.) 

An old painter who knew Cezanne at this time, 
said of him: “Yes, I remember him well! He 
used to wear a red vest and always had enough 
money in his pocket to buy a friend a dinner.” 

Indeed, it was Cezanne’s practice, when he had 
money in his pocket, to spend it before going to 
bed. “Pardieu!” he used to exclaim to Zola, 
who found him prodigal, “if I should die to¬ 
night, would you want my family to inherit the 
money*?” Besides being improvident, he was in¬ 
curably bohemian. His friends tell how, 
in the course of his promenades, he would take 


Courtesy of M. Ambroisc Vollar , 


INTERPRETATION OF AN OLD PHOTOGRAPH 








Paul Cezanne 


33 

it into his head to stretch out full length on one 
of the benches scattered about in the vicinity of 
the Luxembourg Gardens, and how, for fear that 
some thief might relieve him of his shoes while 
asleep, he would use them for a pillow! 

These stories were the despair of Zola, who was 
for the bourgeois comforts every time, and had 
his reception day with tea and cakes. In ad¬ 
dition to Zola’s daily visitors, Cezanne and 
Bailie (who was now pursuing his scientific 
studies at Paris), there were several others who 
had joined his circle. Anthony Vallabregue, a 
young poet from Aix, was among them. Then 
there was Marion, another Provencal, whose 
ambition it was to be a painter, but who was des¬ 
tined in the end for a chair of sciences; and 
lastly Guillemet and Marius Roux, a very ele¬ 
gant young man, so neat and so preternaturally 
immaculate that Zola used to say of him, with an 
admiration not unmixed with irony: “You never 
see the marks of his knees on his trousers!” 

It is not hard to picture the temperaments of 
Zola, Bailie, and Cezanne at that time. The 


Paul Cezanne 


34 

first was shrewd and self-possessed; the second 
dreamed of making a good position for himself in 
the world; Cezanne was the "shuddering and tor¬ 
mented one of the three.’ 5 6 

From his first visits to the Louvre, the young 
painter gathered only confused impressions, over¬ 
whelming visions of light and color. To use his 
own expression, the pageant which unfolded 
before his eyes seemed like a "luminous, colored 
pudding.” Rubens above all amazed him. Un¬ 
der his influence, Cezanne designed great com- 
positions in fulgurant color. Zola, who had put 
his friend on his guard against realism, now found 
that he went to the other extreme, exalted roman¬ 
ticism. Whereupon Cezanne, to offset this tend¬ 
ency, set about to paint droll and pseudo-realistic 
little canvases, like the Woman with a Plea. 
This picture has disappeared, together with 
another of the same period representing a nude 
man sleeping on a folding bed. The model 
who posed for this academie was an old night- 

6 Emile Zola: Notes d’uti ami, by Paul Alexis. Charpen- 
tier. 1882. 


Paul Cezanne 


35 

man, whose wife kept a little creamery where she 
served a beef soup much appreciated by her ra¬ 
venous young patrons. Cezanne, who had won 
his confidence, asked him to pose. The night¬ 
man reminded of his “job.” 

“But you work at night,—you have nothing to 
do in the day-time.” The other demurred, say¬ 
ing he slept during the day. 

“Well then, Fll paint you in bed.” 

The old codger was promptly put under the 
covers, with a neat night-cap on his head in honor 
of the painter. But since it was not worth while 
to bother about the proprieties between friends, 
he took off the bonnet first, then threw back the 
covers, and finally posed quite nude. His wife 
appeared in the picture, handing a bowl of warm 
wine to her husband. 

The prevailing opinion in critical circles about 
Cezanne’s method was that he simply aimed a 
pistol loaded to the muzzle with variegated colors 
at a blank canvas. Thus his manner came to be 
dubbed “pistol-painting.” In truth, Cezanne 
would have been the last to try to prove to the 


Paul Cezanne 


36 

public that there was anything further in his work 
than accidental effects; but, if he knew how to 
paint pictures, he had no gift for explaining them 
or for providing them with appropriate names. 
For the study of the night-man, his friend Guil¬ 
lemet came to his rescue by devising the title, 
An Afternoon at Naples , or The Wine Grog. 
The other studies of the same theme are much 
later than this picture, which was painted in 1863. 

This same year Cezanne made the acquaint¬ 
ance of Renoir. One day the door of Renoir’s 
studio opened, and he beheld one of his friends, 
Bazille, accompanied by two strangers whom he 
presented with the words: “I am bringing you 
two distinguished recruits.” They were Cezanne 
and Pissarro. Cezanne also met Manet about 
this time. He and Zola were introduced to him 
by Guillemet. Cezanne was at once struck by 
Manet’s skill in “realization.” “He hits off the 
tone!” he exclaimed; however, after a moment’s 
reflection, he added, “but his work lacks unity— 
and temperament too.” 

In most cases decisions of this sort had become 


Paul Cezanne 


37 

quite simple for Cezanne. He had divided paint¬ 
ing into two kinds: “husky” 7 painting, of the 
sort that he himself hoped some day to “realize,” 
and “emasculated” painting, that of the “others.” 
In this second category he placed Corot, of whom 
Guillemet never wearied of talking. Cezanne in¬ 
terrupted him one day with: “Don’t you think 
your Corot is a little short on temperament*?” 
Then he added: “I’m painting a portrait of 
Vallabregue; the high-light on the nose is pure 
vermillion!” 

But, if we know The Woman with a Flea , the 
Afternoon at Naples , and the Bathers only by 
hearsay, other more interesting canvases of the 
period of his youth are still extant: The Judg¬ 
ment of Paris (i860), a Self-Portrait (1864) 
Portrait of Vallabregue (1865), Portrait of the 
Negro Scipio done at the Atelier Suisse in 1865, 
Portrait of Marion (1865), Bread and Eggs 
(1865), which we have already mentioned, and 
others. 


7 Couillarde. 


CHAPTER III 


CEZANNE ASPIRES TO THE SALON 
OF BOUGUEREAU 

(1866-1895) 

I N 1866 Cezanne resolved to brave the official 
Salon. He selected An Afternoon at Naples 

and The Woman with a Flea , both of which, in 
his judgment, could be understood by the “bour¬ 
geois’ 5 on the jury. Cezanne, penniless on that 

particular day, was in no position to pay for the 

services of an agent. Taking the bull by the 

horns, he loaded his canvases on a little cart, and, 

assisted by some obliging friends, he set off 

towards the Palais d’lndustrie. His arrival at 

the Salon, surrounded by his young artist friends, 

created a sensation; he was borne in triumphantly. 

Need we say that the jury did not share 

their enthusiasm? Two pictures were refused, 

whereupon Cezanne entered a protest with Mon- 

38 


Paul Cezanne 


39 

sieur Nieuwerkerke, the superintendent of the 
Beaux Arts. There was no reply, so the painter 
again took up the cudgels with the following let¬ 
ter: 1 


April 19, 1866 

Monsieur: 

Recently I had the honor of writing to you 
upon the subject of two of my canvases which 
the jury have just refused. 

Since you have not yet replied, I feel I 
must lay further stress upon the motives which 
caused me to address myself to you. As you 
have doubtless received my letter, I need not 
repeat here the arguments which I felt obliged 
to put before you. I shall content myself with 
saying again that I cannot accept the ill-con¬ 
sidered judgment of people whom I myself 
have not appointed to appraise me. 

I write to you again, then, to fortify my de¬ 
mand. I appeal to the public, and wish to 
have my canvases exhibited in spite of the jury. 
My desire seems to me to be only right and 
proper; and if you will ask any of the painters 
who find themselves in my position, you will 


1 Archives of the Louvre, X, 21 , 1866. 


40 


Paul Cezanne 


find that not one of them has any use for the 
jury, and that they would like to participate 
in one way or another in an exhibition which 
should be compulsorily open to every serious 
worker. 

Let the Salon des Refuses be re-established 
then. . . . Should I find myself alone in this 
demand, I sincerely desire that the public at 
least know that I can no longer stand having 
to do with these gentlemen of the jury who, 
it would appear, wish to have nothing to do 
with me. I hope, Sir, that you will not choose 
to remain silent. It seems to me that any 
seemly letter merits a reply. 

Accept, I beg you, the assurance of my most 
cordial regard. 

Paul Cezanne 

22 Rue Beautreillis. 

This time a reply was forthcoming; the fol¬ 
lowing note was written on the margin of the 
painter’s letter: 

What you ask is impossible. We have now 
come to realize how much beneath the dignity 
of art the exhibition of the Refuses was in the 
past, and it will not be re-established. 



Courtesy of M. Ambroise Vollard 

LOUIS-AUGUSTE CfiZANNE READING ( 1866 ) 



42 


Paul Cezanne 


Guillemet. “They dress themselves up like a 
pack of lawyers!’’ By way of showing his dis¬ 
approval* he played the cynic. Once when 
Manet asked him what he was preparing for the 
Salon, Cezanne flung back, “A pot of s-.” 

During the latter months of the year 1866, 
Cezanne, who after the Salon had gone to spend 
a few days with Zola at Bennecourt on the banks 
of the Seine, made a trip to Aix, and at the Jas 
de Bouffan painted the portrait of his father 
seated in an armchair reading his paper. Of 
the same period there is the portrait of Achille 
Emperaire; VFnlevement came a little later; and 
lastly, in 1868, he executed The Feast, directly 
influenced by Rubens, and Leda and the Swan, 
w T hich he composed after an engraving. The idea 
of this last composition was suggested to him by 
the famous painting of Courbet, The Woman 
with a Parrot . Upon seeing this picture, Ce¬ 
zanne exclaimed, “I’m going to do a Woman 
with a Swan.” Another nude, in the same pose 
but without the Swan, and less archaic in 
form, was painted more than ten years later in 



Paul Cezanne 


43 

preparation for a projected illustration for 
Nana. 

One day I asked Cezanne what sort of a life 
he and Zola had led during the war. He replied: 
“Listen, Monsieur Vollard, I worked a lot out of 
doors at Estaque. Except for that there was no 
other event of importance in my life during the 
years 1870-71. I divided my time between the 
field and the studio. But if I had no adventures 
during those troubled years, things didn’t go so 
smoothly with my friend Zola, who went through 
all sorts of avatars, especially after his final re¬ 
turn from Bordeaux to Paris. He had promised 
to write me as soon as he arrived there. It was 
only after four long months that he was able to 
keep that promise. 

“Due to the refusal of the government at Bor¬ 
deaux to accept the offer of his services^ Zola de¬ 
cided to return to Paris. The poor fellow ar¬ 
rived towards the middle of March, 1871; a few 
days afterwards the insurrection broke out. For 
two months he didn’t do very much; cannon night 
and day, and, towards the end, the shells whistled 


Paul Cezanne 


44 

over his head and landed in his garden. Finally, 
in May, threatened with being taken as a hostage, 
he fled with the aid of a Prussian passport, and 
went to ‘dig in’ at Bonnieres. . . . Zola is 
very hardy! After the Commune, when he found 
himself again comfortably situated in the Batig- 
nolles, all those terrible events which he had 
taken part in seemed nothing more to him than a 
bad dream. 

“ ‘When I behold,’ he wrote to me, ‘that my 
house has not budged an inch, that my garden 
is just the same as it ever was, that not a chair, 
not a plant has suffered, I am at last able to per¬ 
suade myself that the two seiges are nothing but 
“bogey-man” stories contrived to frighten little 
children.’ 

“I’m sorry, Monsieur Vollard, that I didn’t 
save that letter. I should like to have shown you 
a passage where Zola says ‘what a pity that all 
fools are not dead and buried!’ 

“Poor Zola! He would have been the first to 
suffer if all fools were dead! Just for fun, I 
reminded him once of that phrase of his. It was 



Paul Cezanne 


45 


on one of the last evenings that I spent with him. 
He had told me that he was going to dine with 
some noted personage to whom he had been pre¬ 
sented by Monsieur Frantz Jourdain. I couldn’t 
help saying: Must the same, if all fools were 
dead and buried, you would have to sit at home 
and eat your left-over stew with your house¬ 
keeper!’ And would you believe it, my old 
friend couldn’t see the joke at all! 

“Hadn’t I earned the right, Monsieur Vollard, 
to joke a bit with a man when I’d worn out my 
pants with him on the same benches at school?” 

Cezanne continued: “Zola closed his letter by 
urging me to come back to Paris too. 'A new 
Paris is about to be born,’ he wrote; 'it is our 
turn now!’ Our turn now! Zola was a little 
too sanguine, I found; at least as far as I was 
concerned. But all the same, something told me 
to go back to Paris. It was too long since I had 
seen the Louvre. But understand, Monsieur Vol¬ 
lard, I was working at that time on a landscape 
which was not going well. So I stayed at Aix 
a little while longer to study on my canvas.” 


46 


Paul Cezanne 


Shortly after his return to Paris (1872), Ce¬ 
zanne met Doctor Gachet, an ardent admirer of 
modern painting. The revolutionary tendencies 
that this excellent man thought he scented in Ce¬ 
zanne’s art enraptured him, and he vigorously 
urged him to come and paint at Auvers, where he 
himself worked. He confessed confidentially to 
Cezanne that he himself had begun to try a hand 
at painting from the very day that it had been 
given to him to see clearly what painting was all 
about. Delighted to find one of the “initiated” 
so cordial, Cezanne followed his confrere to 
Auvers, where he remained for two years. 
His parents redoubled their efforts to make him 
come back to them, but in vain. The young 
painter was deaf to their appeals—for many 
reasons. Some of them are explained in this 
fragment from one of his letters: 

“At Aix I am not free; whenever I want to 
return to Paris, I always have to put up a fight, 
and, although your opposition may not be abso¬ 
lute, I am always deeply affected by the resis¬ 
tance that I encounter from you. I sincerely 


Paul Cezanne 


47 


want my liberty unfettered and I shall 
take all the more joy in my freedom when I 
feel that I can hasten my return to your midst; 
it would give me great pleasure to work in the 
Midi, some aspects of which offer many re¬ 
sources to the painter; there I would be able 
to attack some of the problems that I wish to 
solve. . . 

Pissarro, who was also working at Auvers, 
cautioned Cezanne not to let himself be domin¬ 
ated by the Masters. Under the influence of his 
friend’s advice, Cezanne resolved, although not 
without a struggle, to subdue the romantic side 
of his temperament. It was then, properly speak¬ 
ing that the inward conflict between two oppos¬ 
ing tendencies began to be waged. 2 

After the war, the Cafe Guerbois was forsaken. 
The former habitues of the place congregated 

2 I have not spoken of the canvases painted between 1869 
and 1873. I might mention Temptation of St. Anthony, 1870; 
Outdoor Scene, in which the painter depicts himself stretched 
out on the ground, 1870; The Promenade, 1871; The Red 
Roofs, i%6<)\The Modern Olympia, 1872; Man with a Straw 
Hat, 1872; The House of the Hanged, 1873; The Cottage in the 
Woods, 1873; Temptation of St. Anthony, 1873. 


48 Paul Cezanne 

now at the Nouvelle Athenes. Cezanne said to 
me one day about Forain, whom he met there— 
a Forain still quite young: “He knew how to 
suggest the folds in a coat even then, the beggar !” 

At the Nouvelle Athenes, as at the Guerbois, 
Manet was the dominating personality. In 1870 
Fantin-Latour painted a famous group of some 
of the faithful^ of the Cafe Guerbois gathered 
about Manet who sits before his easel. In this 
picture, the impression is decidedly that of a mas¬ 
ter surrounded by his disciples. Cezanne alone 
continued to express his distrust of the extraor¬ 
dinary facility manifested by the painter of the 
Oly?npia. “A good job, though,” he would say, 
in speaking of this canvas which, as we know, 
he tried to match with a new Olympia ,, more 
modern in treatment. Manet was equally hos¬ 
tile towards the author of An Afternoon at Na¬ 
ples. He did not beat around the bush about it 
either, as evidenced by his remark to Guillemet 

about Cezanne: “How can you abide such foul 
painting?” V 



OUTDOOR SCENE ( 1870 ) 






Paul Cezanne 


49 

I have asked some of the surviving painters of 
this period how Manet, who copied the Spaniards, 
and later abandoned his magnificent blacks to 
follow in the wake of Monet and Impressionism, 
could have been hailed as the leader of a school. 
“Because,” they would reply, “procedure counts 
for little in art. What made Manet a veritable 
prophet in his day, was that he brought a simple 
formula to a period in which the official art was 
merely fustian and conventionality. You know 
the saying of Daumier: £ I do not like Manet’s 
work at all, but I find that it has this great qual¬ 
ity: it takes us back to the figures on playing 
cards.’ ” 

Cezanne had never talked about Manet in any 
but a joking or whimsical vein. One day, how¬ 
ever, I met him by chance in the Luxembourg, 
standing before the Olympia , and I hoped that 
on this occasion he would express his opinion of 
his contemporary more fully. 8 Cezanne was with 

8 This conversation took place in 1897. {Trans. Note) 


Paul Cezanne 


50 

Guillemet: “My friend Guillemet,” he ex¬ 
plained, “wanted me to look at the Olympia 
again. . . 

I informed Cezanne that there was talk of put¬ 
ting this canvas in the Louvre. At the word 
“Louvre” Cezanne started: “But just listen a 
minute, Monsieur Vollard! . . 

He broke off. His attention had been sud¬ 
denly diverted by the gesture of a gentleman who, 
in leaving the room, waved a friendly salutation 
towards the Floor Planers by Caillebotte. Ce¬ 
zanne burst out laughing. “It’s Carolus! At 
last he realizes that he put his foot into it by 
following Velasquez! . . . Any one who wants 
to paint should read Bacon. He defined the 
artist as homo additus naturae. . . . Bacon had 
the right idea. . . . But listen, Monsieur Vol¬ 
lard, speaking of nature, the English philosopher 
didn’t forsee our open-air school, nor that other 
calamity which has followed close upon its heels: 
open-air indoors! . . 

Two people had stopped before Cezanne’s land¬ 
scapes, which were hung farther along the wall. 


Paul Cezanne 


51 

I pointed them out to the master. He glanced 
at them, and stepped closer to me: “You know, 
Monsieur Vollard,” he said in a low tone, “I’ve 
learned a lot through the portrait I’m doing of 
you. . . . 4 At last they’re putting frames on 
my pictures!” 

Returning to Carolus-Duran, whose conversion 
to Impressionism was ever an inexhaustible sub¬ 
ject for reflection and comment with him, he re¬ 
marked : “The beggar! he has chucked the 
Beaux-Arts! . . . Perhaps the poor chap can’t 
And any one to buy his pictures any more!” 

Guillemet: Just to think that the former tri¬ 
umphs of Carolus-Duran made even Manet 
jealous! One day Astruc buttonholed him and 
said, “Manet, why are you so critical with your 
friends 4 ? . . “My dear fellow,” Manet re¬ 
plied, “if only I made a hundred thousand francs 
a year like Carolus, I could find genius in every¬ 
body, even in you and Baudry!” 

Myself: Do you remember Manet’s remark 
to Aurelien Scholl, who was bragging about his 


* See Chap. VIII 


Paul Cezanne 


52 

influence with Figaro? —“Well then, have them 
put me down in the obituary column!’' 

Cezanne: Listen, Monsieur Vollard, Parisian 
wit gives me a pain. . . . Excuse me, I’m only 
a painter! . . . Painting nudes on the banks of 

the Arc 5 is all the fun I could ask for. Only, 
you understand, all women are cats and damned 
calculating. . . . They might get their hooks on 
me! • Life’s frightful, isn’t it? 

Guillemet (pointing to the Olympia) : Vic- 
toire was the model who posed for that picture— 

what a fine girl she was; and so amusing! 

One day when she came to Manet’s studio she 
said, “Listen, Manet, I know a very charming 
young person, the daughter of a colonel. You 

ought to do a picture of her-the poor child 

is hard up. But take care, she was brought up 
in a convent, and she knows nothing of life, so 
you must treat her with all the respect in the 
world, and see that you don’t say anything you 

6 A river near Aix-en-Provence. 

0 A literal translation of this expression, one of Cezanne’s 
favorites, would be, “They might put the grappling hook into 
me.” Cezanne meant by it, simply, that they might disturb him 
so that he would be unable to work. {Trans, note) 



Paul Cezanne 


53 

shouldn’t.” Manet promised to be on his very 
best behavior. The following day, Victoire ar¬ 
rived with the officer’s daughter and said to her 
without so much as a wink, “Come, my dear, 
show the gentleman your chemise!” 

Cezanne did not seem to relish this playful 
little story at all. He walked away with a pre¬ 
occupied air. Doubtless he was haunted by his 
notion that women were “all cats and damned 
calculating.” 


CHAPTER IV 


THE EXHIBITION OF THE IMPRESSIONSTS 

I N 1874 Cezanne participated in the exhibition 
of the Society of Painters, Sculptors, and 
Gravers at the Nadar Photographic Galleries, 
35 Boulevard des Capucines. There were thirty 
in the group, which included Pissarro, Guillau- 
min, Renoir, Monet, Berthe Morisot, Degas, 
Bracquemond, de Nittis, Brandon, Boudin, Cals, 
G. Colin, Latouche, Lepine, Rouart, and several 
others, all more or less “innovators. 55 This ex¬ 
hibition enjoyed the same sort of success as had 
the Salon des Refuses. But the public found 
occasion to protest from another point of view 
entirely. While you might see the Salon des 
Refuses, an annex to the official salon, free of 
charge, you had to dig into your pocket to see the 
“Impressionists 55 !—for that was the name the 
public bestowed with one accord upon this group 

54 


Paul Cezanne 


55 

of painters after seeing a Monet in the exhibition 
entitled Impression. 

Cezanne had the surprise of his life when he 
found that a collector had taken a fancy to one of 
his canvases and had purchased it. The House 
of the Hanged today in the Louvre—was ac¬ 
quired by Count Doria, who had already given 
evidence of the liberality of his tastes by dis¬ 
covering Cals and Gustave Colin; but must I 
add that the “extravagant” acquisition of Ce¬ 
zanne’s picture resulted in discrediting this ama¬ 
teur in the eyes of the “connoisseurs” of his set 5 ? 

Three years later, in 1877, Cezanne exhibited 
again, with several members of the same group, 
in a vacant flat at 6 Rue Lepeletier. On this 
occasion the exhibitors, at the suggestion of Re¬ 
noir, unhesitatingly adopted the name of Im¬ 
pressionists. 

They did not pretend to be offering a new 
kind of painting; they simply confined themselves 
to telling the public honestly, “Here is our work. 



Paul Cezanne 


56 

We know you don’t like it. If you come in, so 
much the worse for you; no money refunded.” 
But words are so tyrannical that the public came 
to believe that the new word signified a new 
school, a misapprehension which persists even to 
this day. Renoir once said to me: “They think 
we are nothing but makers of theories—we whose 
only object, like the old masters, is to paint with 
clear and joyous colors!” 

As for Cezanne, need I add that his pictures at 
this exhibition again aroused universal condem¬ 
nation? Huysmans himself, although he ex¬ 
tolled the artistic honesty of Cezanne’s work, al¬ 
luded to a “disconcerting absence of balance; 
houses leaning over to one side like drunken men; 
deformed fruit in tipsy bowls. . . 

Although painting was Cezanne’s dominating 
passion to his dying day, the masterpieces of liter¬ 
ature were far from leaving him unaffected. His 
predilections were for Moliere, Racine, La Fon¬ 
taine; among the contemporary writers he gave 
high rank to the Goncourts, Baudelaire, Theo- 


Paul Cezanne 


SI 

phile Gautier, Victor Hugo—in a word, to all 
those who expressed themselves in color-images. 
He even went so far as to compose a verse as a 
tribute to Gautier, inspired by a poem that the 
latter had written in honor of Delacroix: 

"Gautier, le grand Gautier, le critique influ¬ 
ent.” 

Cezanne had become one of a group of poets 
and artists who gathered from time to time at the 
home of Nina de Villard. At Nina’s there was 
a warm welcome for everyone and not the slight¬ 
est trace of formality; they would crowd them¬ 
selves to make room for you at the table; there 
was always something to smoke. It was here 
that Cezanne met Cabaner, one of his admirers 
from the very first. 

Cabaner was a good fellow, something of a 
poet, a fair musician, a bit of a philosopher. 
It is only too true that Fortune had not smiled 
upon him; however, he was jealous of no one, so 
strong was his faith in his musical genius. None 
the less he was inwardly convinced that Destiny, 


Paul Cezanne 


58 

fickle as we know her to be, would cause him al¬ 
ways to be misunderstood. Therefore he resigned 
himself to his fate with good grace. “I will be 
remembered,” he liked to say, “as a philosopher.” 
Many of his sayings have become traditional. 
“My father,” he once remarked, “was a man of 
the Napoleon type, but not so stupid.” And 
another time, “I didn’t know I was so well- 
known. I was saluted yesterday by all Paris.” 
He did not add that he had been following a 
funeral procession. During the siege of Paris, 
when the shells were dropping like rain, Cabaner 
inquired innocently of Coppee, “Where do all 
those bullets come from?” Coppee was stupe¬ 
fied. “From the enemy, most likely.” “Is 
it always the Prussians?” Coppee, beside 
himself: “Well, who do you think they are?” 
Cabaner: “I don’t know. . . . perhaps other 
tribes. . . .” 

In his own field of music, Cabaner’s witticisms 
were no less original. One evening he had played 
a selection of Gounod after one of his own com¬ 
positions; when the applause was over, he re- 


Paul Cezanne 


59 


marked: “Yes, they are both beautiful things.” 
And when asked if he could render silence in 
music, he replied without the least hesita¬ 
tion, “I should need at least three military 
bands.” 

That Cezanne believed in Cabaner’s talent 
is evidenced by a letter written to introduce the 
musician to his friend Roux. 1 But those who 
were not prejudiced by friendship had a different 
tale to tell. At best Cezanne considered music 
an inferior art, with the exception of the melan- 


1 My dear compatriot: 

Although our friendly relations may not have been very 
regular in the sense that I have not very often knocked at your 
hospitable door, nevertheless I do not hesitate to address myself 
to you. I hope you will be willing to disassociate the impres¬ 
sionist painter, the minor part of my personality, from the man, 
and remember only the friend. So it is not the author of 
I’Ombre et la Proie that I am appealing to, but the Aquasixtain 
born under the same sun that shone when I first saw the light 
of day, and I take the liberty of introducing to you my eminent 
friend, the musician Cabaner. I beg you to look favorably upon 
his request; I myself shall come to see you again in the event 
that the door of the Salon should be opened to me. 

I beg you to accept, in the hope that my request will be well 
received, my thanks and my sympathetic friendship. 


P. Cezanne. 


6o 


Paul Cezanne 


choly notes of the hurdy-gurdy, which charmed 
his sentimental soul. He admired its precision. 
“That means something,” he would say. 

Cabaner was not the only one who lavished 
encouragement upon Cezanne. The painter had 
found a great “moral support” in Monsieur Cho- 
quet, an unassuming employee of the government, 
an art collector in his spare moments. Choquet 
came to know Cezanne through the good offices 
of Renoir. A passionate admirer of the art of 
Delacroix, Monsieur Choquet had found his fa¬ 
vorite master again in Renoir. Cordial relations 
grew up between them. Renoir eagerly told 
Monsieur Choquet about Cezanne and even 
brought him to the point of buying a study of 
Bathers. Then Choquet’s troubles began; how 
was he going to introduce the little canvas into 
his home, without incurring his wife’s displeasure, 
which the collector dreaded above all else. Fin¬ 
ally he agreed with Renior that the latter should 
bring the picture to his house, simply under the 
pretext of showing it to him, and, as he departed, 
“forget” to take it with him, so that Madame 


Paul Cezanne 


61 


Choquet might have time to get used to it. 

Renoir arrived with the little canvas. The 
stage was set. 

“Oh! what an odd picture,” cried Monsieur 
Choquet, raising his voice a little in order to at¬ 
tract his wife’s attention. Then, calling her to 
him: 

“Marie, come look at the little painting that 
Renoir has brought to show me!” 

Madame Choquet offered some compliment de 
circonstance , and Renoir “forgot” the picture 
when he departed. When Madame Choquet had 
begun to tolerate the Bathers for her husband’s 
sake, Monsieur Choquet asked Renoir to bring 
Cezanne to see him. The latter, always careless 
about his personal appearance, arrived wearing 
an old cap borrowed from Guillaumin; but his 
reception was none the less cordial. Cezanne’s 
first words were: “Renoir has told me that you 
admire Delacroix.” 

“I adore him. Let us look over my Delacroix 
together.” 

They began with the pictures on the walls. 


62 


Paul Cezanne 


The cabinet where the watercolors were kept pro¬ 
tected from the light was subsequently emptied. 
After the furniture had been covered, the rest 
were laid on the floor, and Monsieur Choquet and 
Cezanne went down on their knees to look at 
them. 

Choquet’s admiration for Cezanne’s art in¬ 
creased quite as rapidly as his esteem for the man, 
who soon became a frequent visitor at the house. 
Monsieur Choquet never missed an opportunity 
to eulogize Cezanne. You could not talk to him 
about painting but that he would fling these two 
words at you: “And Cezanne?” He never suc¬ 
ceeded, however, in persuading any one to buy 
a single canvas; he was quite content if he could 
merely get a hearing when he began to talk about 
“his painter.” 

One day, however, he came to Renoir’s studio 
wreathed in smiles. He had persuaded Mon¬ 
sieur B., a mutual friend, and one of the first 
buyers of Impressionism, to accept as a present 
a little study by Cezanne. “I am not asking 


Paul Cezanne 63 

you to hang it in your house,’’ said Choquet, 
timidly, offering his little gift. . . . 

“Oh, I should hope not,” agreed Monsieur B., 
“what an example to set my daughter, who is 
studying drawing !” 

“It will give me so much pleasure,” continued 
Monsieur Choquet, “if you will just allow me 
to look at these Apples from time to time. All 
you have to do is to put this bit of canvas in 
the drawer here. ...” 

Inasmuch as there was no expense attached to 
this, Monsieur B. agreed willingly enough. 
Some years later, when Cezannes increased in 
price, he found the little picture lying forgotten 
in the bottom of the drawer. He took it at 
once to a dealer. “If that old fool Choquet were 
only alive today,” he said rubbing his hands, 
“wouldn’t he be happy to know that they pay 
real money for this stuff nowadays!” 

Cezanne painted several portraits of Monsieur 
Choquet. One of them, dated 1877, represent¬ 
ing his model seated in an armchair, has for long 


Paul Cezanne 


64 

owed its exceptional notoriety to the fact that 
it is usually taken for a portrait of Henri Roche¬ 
fort. Bathers Resting 2 belongs to this same 
period. Cabaner had remarked that there were 
parts of this picture which were “quite success¬ 
ful”; whereupon Cezanne immediately made him 
a present of it. 

After 1877 Cezanne did not exhibit again with 
the Impressionist group. From now on the only 
thing that counted with him was the Salon des 
Artistes Frangais. When one of his friends had 
a canvas hung in the Salon, he said ironically, 
“It seems you have talent after all.” But none 
the less it was his lifelong ambition to break 
down those doors which remained so persistently 
closed to him. It would be a “kick in the rump” 
for the Institute, as he put it, if he were to be 
hung in the same gallery with Bouguereau. But 
it must be admitted that such language was not 
calculated to obtain for him the good-will of the 
“Bouguereau crowd.” In fact some of his own 

2 The celebrated canvas of the Caillebotte bequest, which 
was refused by the Luxembourg. See Chap. V. 



TIIE GOLDEN CALF 




























Faul Cezanne 


65 

friends openly proclaimed him a failure. The 
defection even extended to Bailie, long since come 
down to earth again, after those lyrical crises 
when he would wail desperately, “I have lost my 
ideal!” He concluded by breaking off all rela¬ 
tions w r ith his old schoolmate, whom he re¬ 
proached with not having a sense of reality, and 
not being a “social power”! Let us hasten to 
say that Cezanne bore no ill will against his 
friend Baptistin for deserting him. 

Another of his former friends, Duranty, wrote 
the following account of a visit that he made to 
Cezanne’s studio. He calls Cezanne “Maillo- 
bert.” 


My eyes were assailed by huge canvases hung 
everywhere, so frightfully colored that I stood 
petrified. “Ah! Ah!” said Maillobert with 
a drawling, nasal, hyper-Marseillaise accent. 
“You are a lover of painting, Monsieur'?” 
Then, pointing to his most gigantic works, he 
added, “Here are the little scrapings from my 
palette!” 

At this point, I heard a parrot screaming: 


66 


Paul Cezanne 


“Maillobert is a great painter, Maillobert is 
a great painter!” . . . 

“That is my art critic/’ said the artist, with 
a disconcerting smile. 

• ••••• 

He observed that I was looking with some 
curiosity at a row of big druggist’s pots set 
out on the floor, and bearing abbreviated Latin 
inscriptions: Jusqui., Aqu., Still., Ferug ., 
Rib., Sulf., Cup., and volunteered: 

“That, Monsieur, is my paint box. I am 
going to show ’em that with drugs I can paint 
beautiful things, while they, with their fine 
colors, make nothing but drugs!” 

• • • • • • 

“You see,” Maillobert continued, “one can’t 
paint without temperament” (he pronounced it 
“temperrammennte” ). 

• • • • • • 

He dipped a spoon into one of the drug 
pots and withdrew it dripping with green paint. 
On the easel was a canvas on which a landscape 
was indicated by a few lines. To this he ap¬ 
plied the paint, turning the spoon round and 
round, until, by a stretch of the imagination 
you could see a meadow on the canvas. I 


Paul Cezanne 


67 

then observed that the color on his pictures was 
nearly half an inch thick, and formed minia¬ 
ture valleys and hills like a relief-map. 3 Evi¬ 
dently Maillobert is convinced that a pound 
of green is greener than an ounce of the same 
color/’ 4 

Cezanne was not disheartened, and every year 
sent two canvases to the Salon. They were con¬ 
sistently refused, until, in 1882, the news came 
out of a clear sky that one of his entries, a por¬ 
trait, had just been accepted! Of course he got 
into the Salon by the back door. His friend 
Guillemet, who was serving on the jury, and who 
tried in vain to get Cezanne’s canvas accepted on 

the second vote, had put it through pour sa charite 
for at that time every member of the jury had 
the privilege of taking into the Salon a canvas by 

one of his pupils, without any conditions. The 
catalogue of the Salon of 1882 contains this entry 
on page 46: 

3 After 1880 Cezanne ceased to paint with a thick impa9to. 
He had discovered, he said, “that painting was not the same 
thing as sculpture.” This did not deter him, however, from 
painting “thick” again towards the end of his life. 

1 4 Duranty, le Pays des Arts, Gharpentier, pp 316-320. 


68 


Paul Cezanne 


“Cezanne, Paul; pupil of M. Guillemet; Por¬ 
trait of M. L. A.’’ 5 

Later, in the interests of equality, the Jury was 
deprived of this autocratic privilege, a regulation 
which denied Cezanne his only chance of being 
shown a second time at the Salon of Bouguereau. 
But the painter was again to have the satisfaction 
of being represented in surroundings no less “offi¬ 
cial, 5J the Universal Exposition of 1889. It 1S 
quite true that here again he was accepted through 
favoritism, or, more accurately, by means of a 
“deal.” The committee had importuned Mon¬ 
sieur Choquet to send them a certain very precious 
piece of furniture, which they counted on featur¬ 
ing at the exposition. He loaned it as a matter of 
principle, but he made the formal condition that 
a canvas of Cezanne’s should be exhibited as well. 
Needless to say the picture was “skyed” so that 
none but the owner and the painter ever noticed 
it. 

6 In spite of every endeavor, I have been absolutely unable 
to discover either the complete name of the model who posed for 
this picture, or just which canvas the name is supposed to refer 
to. 


Paul Cezanne 


69 

No matter; imagine Cezanne’s joy at seeing a 
picture of his actually hung once more! But alas! 
his happiness was not unalloyed this time because 
his father was no longer able to share it. In fact 
Cezanne had had the misfortune of losing his 
father four years before, in the year 1885; 6 
but he consoled himself with the thought that his 
lamented parent had harbored an unshaken confi¬ 
dence in the ultimate triumph of his son. This 
exemplary faith was a matter of paternal pride 
with Monsieur Cezanne: “How could I, Ce¬ 
zanne, have fathered an idiot!” As for the 
mother, who lived until eight years later, passing 
away in 1897, ^ s ^ e l° n ged to see her son’s efforts 
rewarded it was because she knew how her Paul 
suffered from being misunderstood; beyond that 
it made no difference if his work sold or not, as 
long as “the dear child didn’t starve.” 

In 1890 Cezanne exhibited three canvases at 

the “Twenty” in Brussels: a Landscape then be¬ 
longing to Monsieur Robert de Bonnieres, and 

6 Cezanne pere left a large fortune to his son and his two 
daughters. {Trans. Note ) 


Paul Cezanne 


today in the museum at Berlin; the Cottage at 
Auvers-sur-Oise from the Choquet collection; and 
a composition of Bathers. 7 Subsequently the 
painter slashed this last canvas with a palette 
knife, then worked on it again, and finally left it 
unfinished. 

Two years afterwards, in 1892, Cezanne exe¬ 
cuted one of his most important works, The Card 
Players , after making several preliminary studies 
for the various figures which appear therein. 
There exists also a smaller replica of the same sub¬ 
ject, in which the young girl who, in the larger 
canvas, stands near the table watching the game, 
does not appear. 


It was in this same year that I saw Cezanne’s 
pictures for the first time. It was at Tanguy’s in 
Rue Clauzel. Pere Tanguy, a color merchant on 
a small scale, was the benefactor of more than one 


7 “Are these pictures calculated to give us any idea 
whatsoever of the new art?” asks the Federation Artisque 
Beige (January 26, 1890) in reviewing this exhibition. 
The reply followed at once: “Art at sword’s points with sin¬ 
cerity.” 


Paul Cezanne 


71 


unrecognized artist. He considered himself some¬ 
thing of a “rebel” because he had not been shot 
down under the Commune by the party of law 
and order. In reality he was just a good old soul 
who extended credit to impecunious artists, and 
took a passionate interest in their work. But he 
had a marked predilection for those whom he 
called with respectful emphasis, “the gentlemen 
of the School”: Guillaumin, Cezanne, Van Gogh, 
Pissarro, and Vignon, to mention only a few. To 
his way of thinking, being one of the “School” 
was equivalent to being “modern”: which meant 
that one must banish “tobacco juice” 8 from the 
palette forever, and paint “thick.” He cast a sus¬ 
picious eye upon anyone who had the audacity to 
ask for a tube of black. But with good-hearted 
indulgence, he grudgingly bestowed his respect, 
after all was said and done, upon the luckless 
painter who honestly sought to earn his daily 
bread with ivory black. And if the truth were 
known, Pere Tanguy, in common with the very 

8 Jus de chique, painter slang for thin mediums such as var¬ 
nish or turpentine. {Trans. Note) 


72 


Paul Cezanne 


“philistines” whom he scorned, was convinced at 
the bottom of his heart that hard work and good 
behavior were not merely prerequisites, but in¬ 
dispensable elements of success. Accordingly, re¬ 
ferring to the author of a picture done with the 
forbidden “thin mediums,” he said candidly, 
“He’s not one of the 'School’; he’ll have a hard 
time arriving. But he’ll get there in the end; 
he never plays the races and he doesn’t drink a 
drop!” 

Since it had not yet become the fashion to pay 
high prices for “horrors,” nor as yet even low 
prices, people seldom went out of their way to 
go to Rue Clauzel. But when a collector did 
come to see the Cezannes, Tanguy would conduct 
him to the painter’s studio, to which he kept a key, 
and allow him to choose whatever he might want 
from the different piles of canvases, at a standard 
price of forty francs for the small ones and one 
hundred for the large. There were also some 
canvases on which Cezanne had painted several 
little studies of various subjects. He left it to 
Tanguy to cut them up. These little sketches 



in 

Courtesy of M. Ambroise Vollard 

STUDY FOR THE “CARD PLAYERS” (1892) 























Paul Cezanne 


73 

were intended for collectors who could afford 
neither one hundred nor forty francs. So one 
might have seen Tanguy, scissors in hand, dispos¬ 
ing of tiny “motifs,” while some poor Mycaenas 
paid him a louis and marched off with three 
Apples by Cezanne! 

When I came to know Tanguy things had 
changed to some extent. Not that the collectors 
had become more astute, but Cezanne had taken 
back his key, and father Tanguy, who had been 
apprised by Emile Bernard of the superiority of 
certain works over others, cherished the few 
Cezannes that he had left as priceless treasures. 
But, be it said to his credit, he never descended 
to using the magical phrase “private collection,” 
even if he were ever aware of its fascination over 
a buyer. Nor did he know how to employ 
Madame Tanguy’s “personal attachment” to a 
picture as a pretext to advance the price. But 
with visions of some day making a big deal which 
would enable him to be sure of his rent, and to 
offer unlimited credit—even to painters who were 
not of the “School”—he locked up his Cezannes 


74 


Paul Cezanne 


securely in his trunk. After his death they were 
scarcely contested at the Hotel Drouot auc¬ 
tion. 9 


0 Cezanne— Farm, height 

60 

cm., 

width 

73 

cm., 

145 

fr. 

” Village 

46 

cm., 

V 

55 

cm., 

175 

fr. 

” Village 

45 

cm., 

)> 

54 

cm., 

215 

fr. 

” The Bridge ” 

60 

cm., 

JJ 

73 

cm., 

M 

O 

fr. 


(Gazette de 1 ’hotel Drouot, June 19, 1894.) One Cezanne 
was not listed in the Gazette; sales under 100 francs are not 
mentioned. 


< 


CHAPTER V 


THE EXHIBITION AT 39 RUE LAFFITTE 

I N 1895 Government was confronted with 
the necessity of deciding whether or not it 
would accept the Caillebotte bequest for the 
Luxembourg Museum. Among the paintings in 
this bequest were a few by Cezanne, notably the 
Bathers Resting , formerly given to Cabaner, and 
after Cabaner’s death acquired by Caillebotte for 
the sum of three hundred francs. It was an 
enormous price at that time, but when Caillebotte 
liked a picture, the price meant nothing to him. 
When Cezanne heard that his Bathers was going 
to the Luxembourg, the ante-chamber of the 
Louvre, he exclaimed with genuine feeling, “At 

last I’ve-on Bouguereau.” This remark, 

bandied from mouth to mouth, was a great suc¬ 
cess, save in the high places of officialdom where 
it was considered supremely undignified. But the 

75 




Paul Cezanne 


76 

authorities took their revenge by decreeing that 
the Bathers should not be accepted for the Luxem¬ 
bourg, a decision upon which the Beaux-Arts 
counted secretly to rid them of the nightmare of 
the entire Caillebotte collection; for by the terms 
of the will, it was stipulated that all of the pic¬ 
tures should be accepted, or none at all. 

But they had not foreseen the disinterestedness 
of Caillebotte’s heirs. They (the heirs) “respec¬ 
ted the condition imposed,” but their “esteem for 
the 'spirit 5 of the donor' 5 was such that “they did 
not attach too much importance to the 'letter 5 of 
the will. 55 In consequence the administration of 
the Beaux-Arts felt at liberty to play their game 
more openly. Professing a “lack of space, 55 and 
“taking into consideration the interests of the 
painters themselves, 55 they rejected eight Monets, 
three Sisleys, eleven Pissarros, a Manet, and two 
other Cezannes, a Flower Piece and a Country 
Scene , twenty-five canvases in all. In such man¬ 
ner the Caillebotte collection was reduced by 
nearly a half. Alas! no triumphal invasion of 
the Luxembourg for the Impressionists; the 


Paul Cezanne 


77 

friends of “honest painting” were adamant. 
Why! hadn’t some of the professors at the Ecole 
des Beaux-Arts talked of resigning 4 ? 

The heat and the clamor of this wrangle merely 
made me all the more determined to organize in 
Paris a general exhibition of Cezanne’s work, a 
resolve which dated from some time back. Pis¬ 
sarro, who possessed some of the master’s most 
beautiful canvases, immediately offered to lend 
them to me, with the sole reservation that I should 
obtain the consent of the artist. 

Alas! the task was to find the artist! I fin¬ 
ally discovered that he had been seen painting 
in the Forest of Fontainebleau. I searched its 
every nook and cranny. At Avon I was told that 
“Monsieur Cezanne had been there, yes indeed, 
but it’s three months now since he went away!” 
Where? They had no idea. To my query: 
“Did Cezanne have much to do with the people 
of the neighborhood?” they merely replied that 
the painter had procured a small package at a 
stationery store once, in Fontainebleau. I 
visited all the stationers in the city, and at last 


Paul Cezanne 


78 

found the one in question. From him I learned 
that Cezanne had actually had a studio at Fon¬ 
tainebleau. I thought my quest was ended, but 
no, the owner of the studio told me that his ten¬ 
ant had returned to Paris, and that he could not 
remember the address. The only fact that had 
stuck in his memory was that the street where 
Cezanne now lived bore the name of a saint 
coupled with the name of an animal. I went 
through the list of the Paris streets with a fine¬ 
toothed comb, but without result. At last I ac¬ 
cidentally hit upon a street which suggested the 
desired conjunction of saint and beast. One of 
my friends lived in Rue des Jardins; I happened 
to remember that that street was also known as 
Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul, on account of its 
proximity to the church of that name. Not far 
from there, Rue des Lions joined it at right angles. 
I began to have hope. There, in all probability, 
was the name of the animal, and with it was as¬ 
sociated, in popular parlance, the name of a saint, 
patron of a nearby church. Therefore I resolved 
to inquire from door to door the entire length of 


Paul Cezanne 


79 

“Rue des Lions-Saint-Paul”; and lo! at Number 
2, in response to my question, I was pleasantly 
surprised to hear; “Monsieur Cezanne*? Yes, he 
lives here.” 

But he had returned to Aix! The fates had 
conspired against me. His son was at home, how¬ 
ever, and promised to write to him that very day. 

Some weeks later he brought me Cezanne’s 
consent. Renoir happened to be with me at the 
time. He told young Paul Cezanne in no uncer¬ 
tain terms how timely he thought such an ex¬ 
hibition would be. He had always deplored the 
obscurity to which certain of Cezanne’s best 
friends, at least those who declared themselves 
such, had relegated him. 

Pissarro, I regret to add, could not make up 
his mind at the last moment to part with his pic¬ 
tures. But by way of compensation I secured 
nearly one hundred and fifty canvases from 
Cezanne himself. He sent them rolled up to 
spare them as much as possible, because he de¬ 
cided that in transportation the stretchers took up 
too much space. 


8 o 


Paul Cezanne 


All that was left to be done was to organize my 
exhibition. I was fortunate in finding some nar¬ 
row white moulding at two cents a yard which 
an apprentice joiner let me have very cheaply. 
At last I was in a position to announce, through 
the good offices of some journalist friends, that 
an exhibition of Cezanne’s work would open in 
December, 1895, at 39 Rue Laffitte. 

Following are the most important canvases: 
Leda and the Swan 1868; Self-Portrait 1880; The 
Abandoned House 1887; Study of Bathers 1887; 
The Forest of Chantilly 1888; The Great Pine- 
Tree 1887; Portrait of Madame Cezanne in the 
Conservatory 1891; The Banks of the Marne 
1888; Self-Portrait 1890; Young Girl with a 
Doll 1894; Gnderbrush 1894; Madame Cezanne 
with the Green Hat 1888; Bather before a Tent 
1878; Portrait of M . G. 1880; The Al Fresco 
Luncheon 1878; The Basket of Apples 1885; 
Estaque 1883; The Jas de Bouffan 1885; 
Auvers 1880; Gardanne 1886; The Fight 
1885; Portrait of Madame Cezanne 1877. 

The advent of these masterpieces, or of these 


Paul Cezanne 


81 


monstrosities, whichever you prefer, created the 
most profound excitement among the enlightened 
collectors and eclectics who, in search of a Fabiola 
by Henner, a Lansquenet by Roybet, a Venetian 
Scene by Zeim, a Horseman by Detaille, or a 
Bouqut of Flowers by Madeleine Lemaire, came 
and went every day in front of the shop windows 
in Rue Laffitte. I had placed in the window the 
famous Bathers of the Caillebotte collection, 

Leda and the Swan , and another study of nudes. 
It was adjudged an outrage to art—and for some 

the outrage was aggravated by a violation of 
their sense of decency. Even my maid, when she 
saw the fun people made of them, could not re¬ 
frain from protesting: ‘Tm afraid that Mon¬ 
sieur is putting himself in a wrong light with all 
those collector gentlemen, with that picture of 
naked men in the window!” 

Rut an old inhabitant of Rue Laffitte made less 
mournful prognostications: “People don’t buy 
the Impressionists yet because they are ugly; but 
you’ll see, they’ll come ’round to buying them no 
matter how ugly they are; perhaps they’ll even 


82 


Paul Cezanne 


hunt them down just because they are ugly, on 
the theory that that very quality will guarantee 
big prices in the future.” 

The Journal des Artistes sounded the keynote 
of the criticisms of that year. It trusted that its 

charming readers would not have heart failure 
when they saw the “nightmare of these atrocities 
in oil which even eclipse the legally authorized 
effronteries.” ^ Happily they, the charming 
readers, belong to a sex which is capable of any¬ 
thing (the Journal des Artistes is still speaking) ; 
but could even the bravest of the brave pass 39 
Rue Lafhtte without discomfort ? 

Atrocious painting, and easy into the bargain: 
such was the conclusion arrived at by a little 
telegraph boy and an apprentice pastry-cook w r ho 
came into my shop together. I mechanically of¬ 
fered my hand to the former, and told the latter, 
in spite of the tempting aroma that the bakery 
basket gave off* that he must have made some 
mistake. But they both assured me with one 
voice that they came to see the exhibition because 

1 Journal des Artistes, December i, 1895. Un comble. 


Paul Cezanne 


83 

there was a sign over the door reading “Ad¬ 
mission Free.” There was nothing to say to that. 
After a profound examination of the pictures, 
the telegraph boy said to his comrade, “Well, 
well; I suppose the painters can take life easy 
now that that's the stuff that sells.” “Ye-e-es,” 
replied the young pastry cook dubiously, “but 
they must get out of practice awful quick that 
way.” 

Another da3^ I heard screams through the 
door. A young woman was struggling to 
break away from a man who held her with 
a grip like steel before a picture of fathers. I 
caught this bit of dialogue: “How could you 
upset me like this*? And I once took a prize in 
drawing, too!” Then the voice of the man: 
“That will teach you to be more respectful of 
me from now on.” Apparently the husband was 
compelling his wife to look at the Cezannes by 
way of punishment. 

Still the great majority contented themselves 
with crying scandal, without believing themselves 
“sold” in the proper sense of the work; the artists, 


Paul Cezanne 


84 

on the other hand, felt their interests wronged, 
and, what is worse were touched in that tender 
spot, their dignity. Taking it for granted that 
the Cezannes were selling for their weight in gold, 
they would say, with what they judged, simply, 
legitimate resentment: “Why don’t they buy 
my work?” The celebrated painter Ouost was a 
case in point. He himself and certain of his 
colleagues had surnamed him “the Corot of the 
Flower.” He burst in upon me one day, and de¬ 
manded with an air which he intended should 
appear aggressive: “What is that thing in the 
window supposed to represent?” I replied that 
being neither a painter, nor an art critic, nor even 
a collector, I could not give any official answer 
to his question, but that in the catalogue it bore 
the designation Flowers. 

“Flowers!” he gasped, “flowers!! Has your 
painter ever even looked at a flower? How many 
years, monsieur, have I, who stand before you 
now, spent in intimate communion with the 
flower. You know what my friends call me, 
Monsieur? The Corot of the Flower!” And, 



BATHERS RESTING (Caillebotte Collection) 







Paul Cezanne 


85 

rolling his eyes up towards the ceiling, he apos¬ 
trophized: “Oh! corollas, stamens, calyces, 
stems, pistils, stigmas, pollen, how many times 
have I drawn thee and painted thee! More than 
three thousand studies of detail, monsieur, before 
daring to attack the humblest flower of the field! 
And I can't sell them." Then, with a smile: 
“But your Cezanne painted that from paper 
flowers, didn’t he 4 ?’’ I had to admit that, indeed, 
after having tried paper flowers,, because they 
faded less quickly than the natural article, Ce¬ 
zanne had finally copied this bouquet from an en¬ 
graving, to obtain greater dependability of pose. 

Another painter stopped before my window 
with his wife. “Just look at the stuff that sells 
nowadays!’’ wailed the spouse, provoked. “You 
must be heartless to persevere in your wonderful 
art, while your wife and children are dying of 
starvation!” 

“But my honor , woman! Would you want me, 
at my age, to shame myself, and blush before my 
offspring? No, no, I shall not leave you a tar¬ 
nished name!’’ 


86 


Paul Cezanne 


Happily, this bit of dialogue was not over¬ 
heard by my first purchaser since the opening of 
the exhibition. It was a blind collector, blind 
from birth as he told me later; but, being the 
son and the grandson of artists, he had an inborn 
taste for things of art. He arrived with uncer¬ 
tain step, guided by a servant, just as the man 
who was “conquered of life” moved on. To com¬ 
pensate for his lack of sight, he had engaged a 
valet who had done a little painting. Thus the 
valet explained pictures to his master in terms of 
“shop,” to the great delight of the blind man. 
The collector confided to me that by inheritance 
as well as by personal taste, he was of the old 
school—of the days when “they used to draw” 
(and so saying he made the gesture with his thumb 
of drawing in the air), and that, if he went so 
far as to buy a Cezanne, although Cezanne’s con¬ 
ception of art and his own were two quite dif¬ 
ferent things, it would only be by way of homage 
to Zola who had honored Cezanne with his friend¬ 
ship. “For I am in favor of honest vision, too,” 
he said. 



Paul Cezanne 87 

He asked me to let him “see” some of the older 
pictures belonging to a period when Cezanne 
“took more pains with his work, and did not 
bother about selling it.” He took a canvas in 
his hands and let his fingers wander over the sur¬ 
face, guided by his assistant who described in de¬ 
tail the parts that he touched as he came to them. 
After rejecting a certain number of canvases, one 
among them because there was “not enough sky,” 
he chose one painted with a palette knife. “I’m 
prejudiced in favor of drawing,” he said to me, 
“but I don’t mind a certain boldness of execu¬ 
tion.” He also declared that, since he wanted a 
water piece, he was happy to have found a canvas 
painted lengthwise. “The w r ater seems to spread 
out better that way,” he said. 

While the blind man was making his choice, a 
man and a woman were standing in front of the 
window. When they saw him go away with a 
picture under his arm, they rushed into the shop. 
I heard the woman whisper, “Oh, I’m so happy, 
they’re selling them.” 

“That’s just the way our son paints,” she said 


88 


Paul Cezanne 


to me without further ado. “Monsieur Cormon, 
his professor, threatens to send him home if he 
would paint without drawing first. ‘Don’t you 
think he’s on the right track to make good money 
if Cezanne’s pictures sell?” I was compelled to 
reply that Cezanne, now fifty-five years old, had 
not made enough with his paintings after thirty- 
five years of unremitting toil, even to pay for his 
brushes and colors. The mother was prostrated. 
The husband enjoyed a modest triumph but con¬ 
tented himself with saying gently, “You see, dear 
child, without drawing. . . 

Day after day, the most extraordinary persons 
dropped in to see the exhibition. There was one 
man who, after buying one of the most beautiful 
canvases in the shop, turned around and asked 
me, “Why are these so-called 'good’ pictures al¬ 
ways so horrible to look at?” This began to look 
dangerous, and I tried to change the subject, but 
my customer reassured me that he was not buying 
the Cezanne because he liked it, oh Lord no, but 
to make a big deal later on. I could not forbear 
from complimenting him upon his foresight, and 


Paul Cezanne 


89 

urged him to go into the speculation on a larger 
scale; but he decided that it would not be wise to 
“put aH his eggs in the same basket.” Our com 
versation was brought to an end by the entrance 
of two new arrivals. They looked first at the 
pictures and then at each other. 

“Drawing doesn’t count any more?” said one 
with a belligerent scowl. 

The other replied calmly: “Have patience. 
Time has no respect for work that took no time 
to do.” 

It was Gerome and Gabriel Ferrier. 

I recollect a visit that I made in the interests 
of my exhibition to a certain Monsieur N., an 
artist, to whom Cezanne had given some of his 
canvases. 

“Are you a connoisseur or a buyer?” he asked, 
in response to my request to see his Cezanne. 

“A buyer from necessity,” I replied. 

“Then I will show you some of my own pic¬ 
tures. How do you like these two little still- 
lifes?” 

“Very fine. But the Cezannes?” 


90 


Paul Cezanne 


“Cezanne is a friend of mine and I never allow 
anyone to make fun of my friends if I can help 
it. Every connoisseur and painter that saw those 
pictures of his said: ‘Who is the ass that painted 
those things*? 5 so I felt I ought to destroy them, 
so as to be sure that nobody would ever make fun 
of him again, even after his death. 55 

“You dared to destroy those pictures?” 

“Oh, no! It would have been a shame to 
waste such good canvas. I painted over them. 55 

I tried to make my escape, not wanting to hear 
any more, but the wife of this over-zealous friend 
detained me and said with an engaging smile: 
“You will never find better fruit or fish than my 
husband paints. We buy our models at the very 
best stores.” 

I hasten to say that there were others among 
Cezanne’s friends who treated his gifts with more 
respect. Such a one was Monsieur D., who, 
professing very advanced political ideas, accepted 
the canvases that Cezanne gave him, although he 
thought their style intolerable, because their “an¬ 
archistic 55 tendencies went straight to his heart! 


Paul Cezanne 


91 

When I offered to buy his Cezanne, he exulted; 
the dissemination abroad of these ‘'outlandish’’ 
pictures gratified his revolutionary soul. 

Another memory of that exhibition is my 
skirmish with the painter Z. Inasmuch as he 
spoke glowingly of Cezanne’s gifts of color, I 
concluded that it would be agreeable to him to 
offer a little study of Bathers in exchange for one 
of his own works. He looked at me aghast. 
“Are you unaware that I have been proposed by 
the Salon for the third medal?” Judging from 
the prices that the medallist’s pictures bring to¬ 
day, I doubt if now, even by selling his whole 
studio, he could scrape together enough to pay for 
the little picture that he treated with such con¬ 
tempt. 

A still more typical slight was inflicted on the 
painter himself. Pissarro had begged one of his 
friends who was going to pass through Aix to say 
“how do you do” to Cezanne. Monsieur S. went 
to the Jas de Bouffan where he received a most 
cordial welcome. For politeness’ sake he paid 
the painter several banal compliments, and even 


92 


Paul Cezanne 


went so far as to praise two bouquets of flowers. 
Cezanne, delighted to find an admirer of his art, 
begged him to accept them. Monsieur S. would 
have been glad to side-step the gift, but he was 
w T ell-bred, and notwithstanding the annoyance of 
lugging the canvases about with him on his 
travels, (and such canvases!), he accepted them 
because he would not have hurt Pissarro’s feelings 
for the world. 

Several of those who were the most solicitous 
for the success of the exhibition had persuaded me 
to take the nudes out of the window, calling my 
attention to the fact that the public was not yet 
ready for them, and that such a display was cal¬ 
culated to discourage the very best of intentions. 
I finally yielded, a little against my will, and put 
the nudes inside face to the wall; but a visitor, 
in turning the pictures around, discovered the 
Leda with the Swan , and purchased it on the spot. 
Thus the first composition of nudes sold during 
the exhibition was acquired by Monsieur Auguste 
Pellerin. 


Paul Cezanne 


93 

A no less discriminating purchaser was King 
Milan of Serbia. He had bought from me some 
time previous a large composition by de Groux, 
representing a “Slaughter of the Mighty of the 
World.” The “slaughter” included a large share 
of kings and was entitled, Death to the Cows. 
King Milan assured me that he was familiar with 
the ruminant of today, alas! become quite aph¬ 
thous. He knew also the meaning of the expres¬ 
sion manager de la vache enragee. 2 Lastly, he 
was aware of the fact that the word was applied 
to girls who had ceased to be pleasing, and to 
police sergeants; but it was the first time that he 
had ever seen it used to designate a king. “Very 
curious, indeed,” he said. “I’ll buy the pic¬ 
ture.” 

Some time afterwards he brought the thing 
back. “I haven’t grown tired of my picture of 
dead cows,” he said, “but, although in the future 
it is highly improbable that the people will aban¬ 
don themselves to a carnage of kings, it is not, 

2 Manager de la vache enragee —to endure hardships ( Trans . 
Note) 


Paul Cezanne 


94 

perhaps, quite convenient for me to keep the pic¬ 
ture in my possession, out of consideration for 
my fellow-rulers.” 

Monsieur de Camondo, who happened to be 
present, and who at this time was already flirting 
with Impressionism, if I dare so to express my¬ 
self, advised him to take in place of the de 
Groux, some water colors by Cezanne. King 
Milan, dazzled for the moment by the reputation 
that Monsieur de Camondo then enjoyed as a 
connoisseur, consented to take the Cezanne. But 
His Majesty came back to his senses just as he 
was departing, and called back: “Why don’t 
you tell your Cezanne to paint pretty girls in¬ 
stead 4 ?” 

On the last day of the exhibition a stranger 
entered and examined each picture with the air of 
a connoisseur. I thought I had scented a pur¬ 
chaser. Not he! When at last he broke his 
silence, he uttered these solemn words. “Un¬ 
happy man, he is not aware that the great Lucre¬ 
tius has said: Ex nihilo nihil , in nihilum nil 
posse reverti!” He was evidently only one of 


Paul Cezanne 


95 


those “teachers” of whom Cezanne loved to say: 
“They have no guts!” I asked him quite at 
random if he knew Cezanne. The answer came: 
“Homo sum et nil humani a me alienum putol 
At Aix we teachers associate only with each 
other!” 

I had occasion a little while later to meet cer¬ 
tain of Cezanne’s fellow townsmen; for the day 
was drawing near when, after having put the 
master’s painting before Paris and the Parisians, 
I was going to discover for myself what manner of 
man he really was. 


CHAPTER VI 


MY VISIT TO CEZANNE 

1896 

S TENDHAL found the journey from Mar¬ 
seilles to Aix abominably ugly. To me it 
was an enchantment: the tracks of the railroad 
seemed to run straight through the canvases of 
Cezanne. 

When I first encountered the master, I was hard 
put to it to suppress a cry of surprise. He was 
the same man who, two years earlier, had come in 
to see an exhibition by Forain at my galleries. 
After this person had examined them all with the 
greatest care, he turned to me and said, with his 
hand already on the door knob: “One day at the 
Louvre, about 1875, I saw a young man copying 
a Chardin. I stepped closer to look at his work 
and I said to myself, ‘He’ll arrive; he’s working 

for form!’ It was your Forain.” 

96 






Paul Cezanne 


97 

Cezanne greeted me with outstretched hands. 
“My son has often spoken of you. Excuse me 
for a little while, Monsieur Vollard, I am going 
to rest a moment before dinner. I have just come 
back from my motif. Paul will show you the 
studio.’’ 

The first thing that struck me as I set foot in 
the studio was a huge picture of a Feasant pierced 
full of holes with a palette knife. Cezanne used 
to fly into a passion for the most absurd reasons— 
sometimes for no reason at all—and was wont to 
vent his anger upon his canvases. One time, for 
instance, thinking his son looked a little jaded, 
he immediately imagined that the boy had “slept 
out,” woe to the canvas which happened to be 
nearest at hand! I may add that the world has 
young Paul to blame for the destruction of more 
than one Cezanne. As a child he used to poke 
holes in his father’s canvases to the great delight 
of the fond parent. “Look, my son has opened 
up the windows and chimneys!” he would say. 
“He knows it’s a house, the little rascal!” 

Cezanne’s household held the painter in such 


Paul Cezanne 


98 

respect that, when he left a mangled canvas in 
the garden or on the ash heap, they saw to it that 
it was put in the fire. An exception to the rule 
was a certain still-life. Cezanne had tossed it 
out of the window, but it had caught in the 
branches of a cherry-tree, and had hung there a 
long time. Inasmuch as they had seen Cezanne 
armed with a long pole prowling about the tree, 
they decided that he intended to recover the can¬ 
vas, and consequently they left it severely alone. 
I was present when the canvas was rescued. We 
were walking in the garden, Cezanne, young Paul, 
and I. The painter, who was a few paces in 
advance, his head slightly bent, turned around 
suddenly and said to the young man: “Son, we 
must get down the Apples • I think I’ll work on 
that study some more.” 

Cezanne passionately loved the things that be¬ 
long to art, but he wanted them in the museums, 
their natural abode. Consequently his studio con¬ 
tained none of the rare pictures or precious furni¬ 
ture, none, in fact, of the artistic plunder of which 
most artists are so fond. On the floor lay a big 


Paul Cezanne 


99 

box stuffed full of water color tubes; some apples, 
still “posing” on a plate, were in the last stage of 
decay; near the window hung a curtain, which 
always served as a background for figure studies 
or still-lifes; lastly, there were pinned on the walls 
engravings and photographs, both good and bad, 
chiefly bad, representing The Shepherds of 
Arcadia by Poussin, The Living Bearing the Dead 
by Lucas Signorelli, several Delacroix, The 
Burial at Ornans by Courbet; The Assumption by 
Rubens, a Love by Puget, some Forains, Psyche 
by Prud’homme, and even the Roman Orgy of 
Couture. 

At dinner, to which I had been invited, Cezanne 
was in high spirits. What impressed me especi¬ 
ally was his extreme politeness and courtesy when 
asking the slightest favor. His favorite words 
seemed to be “Excuse me!” but notwithstanding 
his spirit of courtesy, I guarded my every word 
with the utmost care, for I was apprehensive lest 
I should call forth Cezanne’s anger, which was 
always ready to burst out at the slightest provoca¬ 
tion. All my precautions, however, did not pre- 



100 


Paul Cezanne 


vent me from making the much dreaded “break.” 
We were talking of Gustave Moreau. I said, “It 
seems that he is an excellent teacher.” When I 
began to speak, Cezanne was in the act of lifting 
his wine to his lips; he stopped, holding it in mid 
air, and cupped the other hand behind his ear, 
being a little hard of hearing. He got the full 
force of the word “teacher.” Its effect was like 
an electric shock. 

“Teacher!” he shouted, setting down his glass 
so hard that it broke; “they’re all god-damned 
old women, asses, all of them! They have no 
guts!” 

I was floored. Cezanne himself was speechless 
for a time after the ruinous outburst he had 
been guilty of. Then he broke into a nervous 
laugh,, and, returning to the subject of Gustave 
Moreau, went on: “If that distinguished 
aesthete paints nothing but rubbish, it is because 
his dreams of art are suggested not by the inspira¬ 
tion of Nature, but by what he has seen in the 
museums, and still more by a philosophical cast 
of mind derived from too close an acquaintance 



Paul Cezanne 


101 


with the masters whom he admires. I should like 
to have that good man under my wing, to point 
out to him the doctrine of a development of art 
by contact with Nature. It’s so sane, so comfort¬ 
ing, the only just conception of art. The main 
thing, Monsieur Vollard, is to get away from the 
ecole—from all the schools. Pissarro had the 
right idea; but he went a little too far when he 
said that they ought to burn all the necropolises of 
Art.” 

A moment later the name of a young man from 
Aix w r as mentioned, a fellow who had just become 
a Bachelor of Sciences at Paris. Accordingly, 
happy to have found something to talk about, the 
extreme banality of which might escape all criti¬ 
cism, and also seeking to honor the city, I offered 
the suggestion that Aix should be proud to have 
given to the world a future savant. But young 
Paul put his fingers to his lips. I did not seek 
to elaborate the idea at the time, but, upon leav¬ 
ing the table, I asked for an explanation of the 
gesture. “My father,” the young man said, “has 
a horror of savants; he puts them in the same class 


102 


Paul Cezanne 


with teachers.” Happily we saw not a single 
teacher or savant that evening, so that it was all 
plain sailing; during the remainder of the repast, 
we continued to talk painting and literature. 
Cezanne aired his enthusiasm for Courbet—“set¬ 
ting aside the fact that he is a little heavy as to 
expression.” I mentioned Verlaine; by way of 
reply he stood up and recited these lines: 

Rappelez-vous l’objet que nous vimes, mon ame, 

Ce beau matin d’ete si doux: 

Au detour d’un sender, une charogne infame, 

Sur un lit seme de cailloux, 

Les jambes en l’air, comme une femme lubrique, 
Brulante et suant les poisons, 

Ouvrait d’une fagon nonchalante et cynique 
Son ventre plein d’exhalaisons. 

When he had finished, I brought back the name 
of Verlaine into the conversation. . . . Cezanne 

interrupted me: '“Baudelaire-there’s a 

writer for you. His Art Romantique is amazing 
and he makes no mistakes in the artists that he 
appreciates.” 

Cezanne could not endure either Van Gogh or 



Paul Cezanne 


103 

Gauguin. Emile Bernard relates that, when Van 
Gogh showed Cezanne one of his canvases and 
asked him what he thought of it, Cezanne replied, 

“You positively paint like a madman.” 1 

And as for Gauguin, he accused him of having 
tried to “rob him of his thunder.” So I took oc¬ 
casion to tell Cezanne in this connection how 
much respect and admiration Gauguin had for 
him; but Cezanne had already forgotten about the 
painter of Tahiti. “You understand, Monsieur 
Vollard,” he said seeking to enlist my sympathies 
in his own cause, “I have a little thunder, but I 
can’t seem to express it. I’m like a man who has 
a piece of gold, and can’t make use of it.” 

To divert the master’s train of thought, I in¬ 
formed him that a collector had just acquired 
three of his pictures in one purchase at my gallery. 

“Was he a Frenchman?” inquired Cezanne. 

“A foreigner, a Hollander.” 

“They have some fine museums there!” he 
mused. 

Anxious to display my enthusiasms in art, I 

1 Mercure de France, Dec. 16, 1908. P. 607 


104 Paul Cezanne 

began to praise the Night Watch. Cezanne inter¬ 
rupted me. 

“I know of nothing more ridiculous than all 
those people who crowd about the Night Watch 
and sigh with ecstasy. They would be the very 
first to vomit on it if Rembrandts should begin to 
go down in price. . . . Why, with that mob 
around it, if I only had to blow my nose, I’d have 
to leave the room. You know, Monsieur Vollard, 
the grandiose (I don’t say it in bad part) grows 
tiresome after a while. There are mountains like 
that; when you stand before them you shout, 
"Norn de Dieu. . . / But for every day a simple 
little hill does well enough. Listen, Monsieur 
Vollard, if the Raft of the Medusa hung in my 
bedroom, it would make me sick.” Then sud¬ 
denly: “Ah! when will I see a picture of mine in 
a museum 4 ?” It just so happened that Monsieur 
de Tschudi, director of the National Gallery in 
Berlin, was desirous of acquiring a picture of the 
Jas de Bouffan. I acquainted Cezanne with the 
fact and deplored the interdiction of the German 
emperor against the Impressionists. “He’s right,” 


Paul Cezanne 


105 

cried Cezanne, “everybody’s going crazy over the 
Impressionists; what art needs is a Poussin made 
over according to nature. There you have it in 
a nutshell!” Then, leaning towards me with a 
confidential air, but with the loud voice habitual 
with people who are hard of hearing: “William 
is all to the good!” I soon had occasion to ob¬ 
serve, however, that the agreement between Ce¬ 
zanne and the Emperor of Germany was not quite 
complete. I mentioned the name of Kaulbach, 
of whom, we are told, the Emperor loved to say, 
“We too have our Delaroche.” Cezanne foamed 
at the mouth: “I don’t have anything to do 
with emasculated art!” 

We talked of Corot. Cezanne, his voice 
choked with laughter, said: “Emile used to say 
that he might have enjoyed Corot to the utmost 
if he had peopled his forests with peasants in¬ 
stead of nymphs.” Then, rising, he brandished 
his fist at an imaginary Zola: “The god-damned 
idiot.” His anger suddenly subsided, but with 
the traces of emotion still in his voice, he said, 
“Excuse me, I love Zola so much!” 


io6 


Paul Cezanne 


As for Puvis de Chavannes, I never had to 
ask Cezanne what he thought about him. Renoir 
had told me that one day at the studio of a mutual 
friend, when the conversation had turned to 
Puvis, and when every one was paying homage 
to The Poor Fisherman , Cezanne, who appeared 
to be asleep on the sofa, half raised himself and 
remarked, “Yes, it’s not bad imitation.” 2 I must 
add that at my Cezanne exhibition, Puvis de 
Chavannes, after having attentively examined the 
pictures, departed with a mere shrug of the shoul¬ 
ders. 

Nor did Cezanne relish Whistler nor Fantin- 
Latour, both of whom paid him back in the same 
coin. Whistler,* who had seen at my shop the 
portrait of Cezanne’s sister, which so strangely 
resembles a Greco, said in all seriousness: “If 
a six-year-old child had drawn that on his slate, 
his mother, if she were a good mother, would 
have whipped him.” 

Fantin-Latour pronounced a like sentence. At 

2 By “imitation” Cezanne meant stupid realism. {Trans. 
Note) 


Paul Cezanne 


107 


Fantin’s studio, I had encountered a commissioner 
of the Louvre of whom I requested authority 
to take to the museum one or two Cezannes, in 
order to compare them with the Chardins and the 
Rembrandts. Ordinarily Fantin-Latour was 
kindness itself, and never voiced, especially about 
painters, any but the most innocuous truths; but 
at the mere thought of a Cezanne carried through 
the halls of the Louvre,, he burst out: “Don’t 
you dare to treat the Louvre lightly in my pres¬ 
ence !” 


/ 


CHAPTER VII 


AIX AND ITS PEOPLE 

C EZANNE loved his native city passion¬ 
ately. Each house, each street brought 
back memories of his childhood. Nevertheless 
he considered the people of Aix “barbarians.” 
They in turn judged him quite as severely. But 
their contempt began to diminish appreciably 
from the very day that Cezanne’s pictures began 
to sell. 

I had imagined that at Aix “Cezannes” grew on 
every bush. I was told that for long Cezanne 
had offered his canvases to any comer, and used 
even to abandon them in the fields, like the water- 
color of Bathers that Renoir discovered while 
walking one day among the rocks at Estaque. 
My expectations were not fulfilled; the people 
of Aix were not the kind to be deceived by such 
“daubs.” 

108 



THE AL FRESCO LUNCHEON ( 1878 ) 








Paul Cezanne 


109 

But behold! an individual arrives at my hotel 
with something wrapped up in a cloth. “I’ve 
got one of them,” he said without further ado; 
“as long as they want ’em in Paris, and they’re 
going big, I want to be in the swim.” He undoes 
the package and shows me a Cezanne. “Not 
less than one hundred and fifty francs,” he cries 
gleefully, slapping himself smartly on the thigh, 
the better to assert his claim and at the same time 
to bolster up his courage. When I have counted 
out the money for him,, he remarks, “Cezanne 
thought it was a pretty good joke when he made 
me a present of that! But the laugh is on him 
now!” After he has given full rein to his joy 
he continues, “Come with me!” I follow him 
to a house. There, on the landing, which at Aix 
does double duty as hallway and storeroom, some 
magnificent Cezannes rub elbows with other arti¬ 
cles of the utmost disparity: a bird cage, a 
cracked chamber pot, a syringe broken beyond 
repair. (It is a fact that the people of the 
Midi are loath to throw away or destroy anything 
whatever that may once have belonged to them.) 


110 


Paul Cezanne 


The door is ajar, but fastened with an iron chain; 
my guide knocks. A bolt is drawn. Numerous 
questions are asked. But there seem still to be 
misgivings, for I overhear some one put this ques¬ 
tion to my cicerone: “Just how well do you 
know this stranger who is with you?” An inter¬ 
minable conference follows; finally they demand 
a thousand francs for the Cezannes on the land¬ 
ing. I hasten to produce a bank note. Another 
conventicle between the three natives; they in¬ 
form me at last that the deal will not be con¬ 
cluded until the note has been verified at the 
Credit Lyonnais. The husband takes that mis¬ 
sion upon himself; his wife recommends that if 
the note is declared good, he bring the money 
back in gold; “it will be safer in case of fire.” 
When the husband returns, the precious metal in 
his hands, their joy is so great that they give me 
a piece of string into the bargain to tie up the 
Cezannes! “It’s very good cord,” the wife as¬ 
sures me. “We don’t give it to all our cus¬ 
tomers.” But another surprise is in store for 
me. I have scarcely left the doorstep when I 


Paul Cezanne 


ill 


am hailed from the window. “Hey! mister art¬ 
ist, you forgot one of them!” And a Cezanne 
landscape falls at my feet! 

I had been told about another man at Aix who 
possessed some studies by Cezanne. I called on 
him. Before I had gotten my question fairly out 
of my mouth he cut me short: “Cezanne*? I 
know him well; I was present when he was born. 
In regard to the study, I have never had but one, 
and I sold it, after having practiced for forty 
years, so that I could retire.” We might have 
talked until Doomsday without understanding 
each other; the study he was referring to was his 
bailiff’s “study,” or office. I tried to make him 
understand some other way. “Did Cezanne ever 
give you anything?” “Ah! poor fellow! he gave 
me some pictures that he made himself. But 
I write poetry.” 

Whereupon the old man took some papers from 
his pocket, and began to read me several hundred 
lines of verse,, under the alluring but misleading 
title: “This is a Sonnet .” While he was strug¬ 
gling to regain his breath, I asked, in order not 




112 


Paul Cezanne 


to lose any time: “Have you never thought of 
selling your Cezannes?” “I never sell things that 
have been given to me, even if they are not 
beautiful.” 

I took leave of the poet and inquired 
my way to another house at Aix, the home of a 
certain Countess R., who, I was told, possessed 
some Cezannes to which she attached no value. 
I hoped to secure these canvases, but my proposal 
of purchase was rejected with scorn. I was not 
even allowed to see them. 

“They’re in the granary . . . and I tell you 
again, that’s not art. . . 

Myself: But, they are worth money, and in 
case the rats. . . . 

The Countess (sharply) : Well, let my rats 
eat up my Cezannes; I’m no shop-keeper! 

It was my last attempt. But when it was 
noised about that “Cezannes were selling in 
Paris,” I was beseiged by everybody in the prov¬ 
ince who painted or had ever tried to paint. I 
did my best to discourage those who brought me 
samples of their work by explaining that it was 


Paul Cezanne 113 

too “well done” to sell in Paris, where the pref¬ 
erence did not run to “good painting.” They 
were not in the least downhearted about it; it 
would be easy enough to paint “topsy-turvy,” 
but they simply objected because, if they worked 
that way, they would have to “paint to order, and 
if the fashion at Paris should change, what would 
they do with their paintings at Aix, where the 
people wanted their pictures well done 4 ?” 

Another Aixois thought that he had discovered 
the reason for Cezanne’s success in Paris. “I get 
the idea,” he said to me. “They buy that stuff in 
Paris to make sport of us Aix folk.” In fact 
there seems to be a very wide-spread notion in 
the Midi, and also, I imagine, in the North, that 
Paris has its gaze fixed on the provinces to find 
something to laugh about. 

The foremost among all these “teasers of the 
palette” was a woman who kept a drug store, 
and who, in her leisure moments, lovingly painted 
little lambs eating their straw in art nouveau 
stables. She boasted that she had received ad¬ 
vice and encouragement from Cezanne. I asked 


ii4 


Paul Cezanne 


the master about his pupil. “Listen Monsieur 
Vollard. Madame S. asked me to give her some 
lessons, I said to her, ‘Follow my example; 
force yourself, above all, to develop personality.’ 
She’s a hard worker, and, if she persists, she may 
make an excellent second-rate Rosa Bonheur in 
twenty years or so. If I were as clever as Ma¬ 
dame S., I would have gotten into the Salon long 
ago.” 

It was on the strength of similar self-dispar¬ 
agements that many people, to whose interest it 
was to take him at his own word, put Cezanne 
down as a failure. Nevertheless, if he offered 
encouragement to Madame S., it was not to make 
sport of her. He had too much respect for any 
one who tried sincerely to develop personality. 
He failed of finding that sincerity in Signol, or 
in Debufe, whose Prisoner of Chillon , “fright¬ 
fully well done,” hung in the Aix museum. He 
felt that there was more honesty in the art of 
Bouguereau. Sometimes in an access of fury 
against himself induced by his difficulty in “real- 


Paul Cezanne 


115 

izing,” he would even go so far as to say: “I 
wish I were Bouguereau,” and then explain at 
once with, “He developed his personality.” 

One day Cezanne took me over to his sister 
Marie’s house to show me a study which was 
“rather successful.” But it was the hour of 
vespers and we found no one at home. Being 
unable to see the picture, I asked Cezanne if he 
would take a stroll in the garden. Rarely has a 
walk been so profitable to my soul. Everywhere 
were posted prayers entitling one to indulgences, 
some good for a few days, some for several 
months, and some, indeed, for whole years. 

After the visit to Mile. Marie, Cezanne and I 
set out along the Arc River. We were trying to 
escape the heat; there was not a breath of air 
stirring. Cezanne said, “I should think that this 
temperature would be useful only for the expan¬ 
sion of metals and to increase the sale of liquor. 
Now there is an industry that’s taking on 
respectable proportions here at Aix. . . . I’m 


/ 


n6 


Paul Cezanne 


sick and tired of the airs put on by the ‘intellec¬ 
tuals’ in my part of the country; pack of b—s, 
fools, idiots. . . 

Myself: But there are exceptions, certainly. 

Cezanne: There are exceptions but you never 
hear about them. Real modesty is always un¬ 
aware of itself. But I do like Jo. ...” 1 

Shading his eyes with his hand, Cezanne gazed 
intently at a certain place along the river. 
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful to paint a nude 
there? There are innumerable motifs here on 
the banks of the river; the same spot viewed 
from a different angle offers a subject of the ut¬ 
most interest. It is so varied that I think I 
could keep busy for months without changing my 
place, simply turning now to the right and now 
to the left. 

“Listen Monsieur Vollard, painting certainly 
means more to me than anything else in the 
world. I think my mind becomes clearer when 
I am in the presence of nature. Unfortunately, 
the realization of my sensations is always a very 


1 The poet Joachim Gasquet. 


Paul Cezanne 


117 


painful process with me. I can’t seem to ex¬ 
press the intensity which beats in upon my senses. 
I haven’t at my command the magnificent rich¬ 
ness of color which enlivens Nature. Never¬ 
theless, when I think of my awakening color sen¬ 
sations, I regret my advanced age. It is distress¬ 
ing not to be able to set down specimens of my 
ideas and sensations. Look at that cloud; I 
should like to be able to paint that! Monet 
could. He has muscle.” 

Cezanne rated Claude Monet the highest 
among contemporary painters. Sometimes, in 
talking about Impressionism, he would attack 
the painter of the Hours with this favorite sally:. 
“Monet is only an eye.” And then he would 
add directly, “but good Lord what an eye!” 

We had returned to the city; Cezanne led me 
to the church of Saint Sauveur, where he pointed 
out for my admiration the massive walnut doors. 
They were embellished with carvings, very deli¬ 
cate in workmanship, executed about the year 
1500. In the interior of the church, he also 


n8 


Paul Cezanne 


showed me a painting, The Burning Bush , which 
the good people of Aix, he said, attributed to 
King Rene. “At all events,” he added, “it’s 
not bad imitation in a rude way.” 

Myself: I have read in Stendhal’s Memoirs 
of a Tourist that it was good King Rene who in¬ 
stituted the Procession of the Fete-Dieu at Aix. 

Cezanne: Listen, Monsieur Vollard. When 
my friend Zola and I were very young, we fol¬ 
lowed that procession many a time. 

After we left Saint Sauveur, it was time for 
Cezanne’s siesta, and he returned home. He ad¬ 
vised me to go and hear the music on the Course. 
It is one of the prettiest spots in Aix, with its 
golden plane trees and its three fountains, the 
central one playing warm water. I observed, 
not without surprise, that the statue of King 
Rene, the handsomest ornament of the 
square, was besmeared with black. I mentally 
charged up this misdeed against the republicans 
of the city; but I learned before long that it had 
been done by an enfuriated regionalist who had 
emptied a bottle of ink on the early sovereign of 


Paul Cezanne 


119 


Provence to punish him for leaving his states 
unprotected, when he died, from the covetousness 
of the King of France. I learned at the same 
time that the old nobility of Aix, protesting 
against the incorporation of Provence with 
France, rigorously prohibited all commerce with 
“foreigners,” meaning by that designation any¬ 
body born farther away than Avignon! 


CHAPTER VIII 


CEZANNE PAINTS MY PORTRAIT 

(1896-1899) 

M Y relations with Cezanne were not con¬ 
fined to the visit I made to Aix. I saw 
him again on each of his trips to Paris, and his 
good-will was such that one day I ventured to 
ask him to paint my portrait. He consented at 
once, and arranged a sitting at his studio in Rue 
Hegesippe-Moreau for the following day. 

Upon arriving, I saw a chair in the middle of 
the studio, arranged on a packing case, which was 
in turn supported by four rickety legs. I sur¬ 
veyed this platform with misgiving. Cezanne 
divined my apprehension. “I prepared the 
model stand with my own hands. Oh, you 
won’t run the least risk of falling, Monsieur Vol- 
lard, if you just keep your balance. Anyway, 
you mustn’t budge an inch when you pose!” 


120 




Paul Cezanne 


121 


Seated at last—and with such care!—I 
watched myself carefully in order not to make a 
single false move; in fact I sat absolutely motion¬ 
less; but my very immobility brought on in the 
end a drowsiness against which I successfully 
struggled a long time. At last, however, my 
head dropped over on my shoulder, the balance 
was destroyed, and the chair, the packing-case 
and I all crushed to the floor together! Cezanne 
pounced upon me. “You wretch! You’ve 
spoiled the pose. Do I have to tell you again 
you must sit like an apple? Does an apple 
move?” From that day on, I adopted the 
plan of drinking a cup of black coffee before go¬ 
ing for a sitting; as an added precaution, Cezanne 
would watch me attentively, and, if he thought 
he saw signs of fatigue or symptoms of sleep, he 
had a way of looking at me so significantly that 
I returned immediately to the pose like an angel 
—I mean like an apple. An apple never moves! 

The sittings began at eight o’clock in the 
morning and lasted until half past eleven. Up¬ 
on my arrival, Cezanne would lay aside Le Pel - 


122 


Paul Cezanne 


erin or ha Croix, his favorite journals. “They’re 
sensible papers,” he would say. “They lean on 
Rome.” It was the time of the war between the 
English and the Boers; and as Cezanne was al¬ 
ways in favor of justice, he usually added: “Do 
you think the Boers will win?” 

The studio in Rue Hegesippe-Moreau was even 
more simply decorated than the one at Aix. A 
few copies of Forain’s drawings, clipped from 
the newspapers, formed the basis of the master’s 
Paris collection. Cezanne had left what he 
called his Veroneses, his Rubens, his Lucas Sig¬ 
norellis, his Delacroix—that is to say the penny 
reproductions of which I have already spoken 
—at Aix. One day I told the painter that he 
could get very fine reproductions at Braun’s. 
His answer was: “Braun sells to the museums.” 
He looked upon a purchase from a purveyor to 
the museums as regal extravagance. 

I can never forgive myself for having insisted 
on Cezanne’s putting some of his own work on 
the walls of his studio. He pinned up about 
ten water-colors; but one day when the work was 



Paul Cezanne 


123 

going badly, and after he had fretted and fumed 
and consigned both himself and the Almighty to 
the devil, he suddenly opened the stove, and tear¬ 
ing the water-colors from the walls, flung them 
into the fire. I saw a flicker of flame. The 
painter took up his palette again, his anger ap¬ 
peased. 

When a sitting began, he would look at me his 
eyes intent and a little hard, his brush poised in 
the air. Sometimes he seemed restless. Once 
I heard him mutter fiercely between his teeth, 
“That fellow Dominique 1 is damnably good;” 
then,, putting down a stroke, and leaning back to 
judge the effect; “but he gives me a pain!” 

Every afternoon Cezanne would be off to copy 
in the Louvre or the Trocadero. Not infre¬ 
quently he would stop in to see me for a moment 
about five o’clock, his face radiant, and would 
say, “Monsieur Vollard, I have good news for 
you. I’m pretty well satisfied with my work so 
far; if the weather is 'clear gray’ tomorrow, I 
think the sitting will be a good one!” That 


1 Dominque Ingres. 


124 


Paul Cezanne 


was his principal concern when the day was done: 
what kind of weather would we have tomorrow 4 ? 
Inasmuch as he was in the habit of going to bed 
very early, he usually woke up in the middle of 
the night. Haunted by his obsession, he would 
open the window. When he was satisfied about 
the weather, he would go and look over the work 
he had done, candle in hand, before getting back 
into bed. If he were pleased with his examina¬ 
tion, he would wake up his wife so that she 
might share his satisfaction. And to make 
amends for disturbing her, he would invite her 
to play a game of checkers. 

But for the sitting to be a real success, it was 
not enough for Cezanne to be satisfied with his 
study at the Louvre and for the weather to be 
“clear gray”; there were other conditions neces¬ 
sary, above all that silence should reign in the 
“pile driver factory.” That was the nickname 
Cezanne had given to an elevator in the neigh¬ 
borhood. I took care not to tell him that when 
the noise stopped, it probably meant that the ele¬ 
vator was undergoing repairs; I left him to his 



Courtesy of M. Ambroisc Vollard 

PORTRAIT OF M. AMBROISE VOLLARD 














Paul Cezanne 


125 


hope that the owners would fail in business some 
day. In fact the noise stopped very often, and 
he reflected hopefully that the pile drivers 
stopped when business was not good. 

Another noise that he could not endure was the 
barking of dogs. There was a dog in the neigh¬ 
borhood which made itself known occasionally— 
not very loud to be sure. But Cezanne had de¬ 
veloped an extremely sharp ear for sounds which 
were disagreeable to him. One morning when 
I arrived he greeted me all smiles: “Lepine 2 
is a good fellow! He has given an order for all 
dogs to be put in the pound; it’s in La CroixL 
Thanks to this we had several good sittings: the 
weather continued to be “clear gray,” and, by a 
piece of good fortune, the dog and the pile driver 
factory never made a sound. But one day, when 
Cezanne had remarked to me for the thousandth 
time, “Lepine is a good fellow!” a faint “bow- 
ow-ow” came to our ears. With a start he let 
his palette fall and cried in a discouraged voice, 
“The wretch has got loose again!” 

2 The prefect of police at the time. 


126 


Paul Cezanne 


Very few people ever had the opportunity to 
see Cezanne at work, because he could not en¬ 
dure being watched while at his easel. For one 
who has not seen him paint, it is difficult to 
imagine how slow and painful his progress was on 
certain days. In my portrait there are two little 
spots of canvas on the hand which are not cov¬ 
ered. I called Cezanne’s attention to them. “If 
the copy I’m making at the Louvre turns out 
well,” he replied, “perhaps I will be able to¬ 
morrow to find the exact tone to cover up those 
spots. Don’t you see, Monsieur Vollard, that 
if I put something there by guesswork, I might 
have to paint the whole canvas over starting from 
that point?” The prospect made me tremble. 

During the period that Cezanne was working 
on my portrait, he was also occupied with a large 
composition of nudes, begun about 1895, on which 
he labored almost to the end of his life. 

For his groups of nudes, the painter made use 
of sketches from life that he had made some years 
before in the Atelier Suisse; beyond that, he re¬ 
sorted to his memories of the museums. 


Paul Cezanne, 


127 

His ambition was to pose nude models out of 
doors; but that was not feasible for many reasons, 
the most important being that women, even when 
clothed, frightened him. The only exception to 
this rule was an old servant whom he used to 
employ at the Jas de Bouffan, an odd creature 
with a craggy countenance about which he used 
to say admiringly to Zola: “Look, isn’t it hand¬ 
some? You might almost say it was a man!” 

Imagine my surprise, then when one day he 
announced that he wanted to pose a nude female 
model. I could not help exclaiming, “What, 
Monsieur Cezanne, a nude model?” 

“Oh Monsieur Vollard, don’t worry, Lll get 
some old crow!” 

He found just the one he wanted, and after 
doing a study of the nude, he painted two por¬ 
traits of the same model clothed; they remind one 
of the poor relations that people Balzac’s stories. 3 

Cezanne assured me that he found this “camel” 

3 Among the women who posed for Cezanne, a certain old 
woman who had formerly been a nun’s attendant, and who had 
suffered many misfortunes, might be mentioned. It was she 
who posed for the Woman with a Rosary. 


128 


Paul Cezanne 


much less satisfactory as a model than me. “It is 
becoming very difficult to work from a female 
model,” he explained. “And besides, I have to 
pay very high; the price has gone up to four 
francs, twenty sous more than before the war. 
Oh! if I can only realize your portrait!” The 
goal of his ambition was always the Salon of 
Bouguereau, until the Louvre should be open to 
him. He considered the Louvre the only sanc¬ 
tuary worthy of his art. 

Cezanne used very pliable brushes made of 
sable or pole-cat hair; after each touch he washed 
them in a medium-cup filled with turpentine. 
No matter how many brushes he began with, he 
used them all during a sitting, and he daubed 
himself up to such a degree that once, at Aix, 
when he was coming back from his motif , the 
the gendarmes asked him for his identification 
papers. Cezanne swore that he was a native; 
they insisted that they had never seen him before. 
“Well, I J m sorry,” the painter said, with such 
an accent that the police could not have been left 


Paul Cezanne 


129 

with the shadow of a doubt: a man with an ac¬ 
cent like that must have been from Aix! 

The solidity of Cezanne’s painting is readily 
explained when one knows his method of work¬ 
ing. Inasmuch as he did not paint with a thick 
impasto, but put one layer of paint as thin as 
water-color over another, the paint dried in¬ 
stantly; he never had to fear the internal conflict 
of the colors which produces cracks when the 
upper and the lower layers dry at different times. 

I have already said that Cezanne did not like 
to be watched when painting. Renoir, who used 
to accompany Cezanne on painting trips during 
his visit to the Jas de Bouffan, told me just how 
acute the painter’s susceptibilities were. An old 
woman was in the habit of installing herself with 
her knitting a few paces from where they used to 
paint. Her proximity always threw Cezanne in¬ 
to a state of extreme exasperation. One day he 
could stand it no longer. Seeing her approach, 
w T ith his keen and piercing eyes, from a great dis-? 
tance, he cried: “Here comes the old cow!” and 


130 


Paul Cezanne 


in spite of all Renoir’s efforts to stay him, he 
packed up his traps and marched off in a rage. 

It is easy to imagine his anger if he were sur¬ 
prised with brush in hand. One day when he 
was working in the field with a young painter 
named Le Bail, whom he had put in front of him 
so that the younger man could not watch him 
work, a passer-by who had approached unheard 
said in a loud voice, “I like the young man’s pic¬ 
ture better.” Cezanne quit at once, furious that 
any one should have spied on him while he was 
painting, and very much annoyed at the lout’s 
reflection on his work. Nevertheless he stead¬ 
fastly believed that the public really knew whether 
a picture was “well realized” or not. Small won¬ 
der that by dint of hearing Cezanne complain of 
not being able to “realize,” that same irreverent 
public should have found in the end a certain lack 
of assurance in his work. When some one pro¬ 
pounded the idea that this peculiarity was due 
to a certain irregularity in the painter’s visual 
field, Cezanne seized upon the notion as a fresh 
excuse for bewailing his inability to realize. Even 


Paul Cezanne 


131 

Huysmans, in his estimate of the painter, gave 
credence to this myth about a malformation of 
the eyesight: “An artist with diseased retinae, 
who, exasperated by faulty vision, has discov¬ 
ered the prodromes of a new art.” 4 

Though Cezanne did not permit me to utter a 
single word during the sittings* he would talk 
willingly enough while I was getting ready, and 
also during the all too short rests that he allowed 
me. Upon entering one morning I found him 
grinning from ear to ear. He had discovered in 
Le Pelerin that some shares in the Sosnowice 
(which he pronounced Sauce novice) were being 
offered to the public. “They’ll go bankrupt,” he 
said. “The public isn’t fool enough to buy any¬ 
thing with a name like that.” Some days later I 
found him sobered; the stock had gone up. “Too 
bad, Monsieur Vollard,” he said, “they’ve found 
some easy marks. Life’s frightful, isn’t it!” 
Then, with the sort of self-satisfaction that we 
feel when others are being made sport of while we 
ourselves are out of harm’s way, he added: “I’m 


1 4 J. K. Huysmans. Certains. 


132 


Paul Cezanne 


not used to the ways of the world, so I lean on 
my sister, she leans on her confessor, a Jesuit 
(they’re mighty wise, those people), and he leans 
on Rome.” 

Superficial observers, hearing the great painter 
complain of such childish things, and seeing him 
take everything for granted without the slightest 
examination, could not resist the temptation to 
turn such naivete to their profit; but when Ce¬ 
zanne pulled himself together—and he was for¬ 
ever pulling himself together—he went at them 
hammer and tongs, and, once well rid of an in¬ 
truder, he would pronounce his favorite phrase: 
“The wretch, he tried to get his hooks on me!” 
Cezanne did not adopt the laissez-faire attitude 
with any idea of hoodwinking the public. Did 
he not say of himself: “After an event has oc¬ 
curred or an idea has been propounded, it takes 
me a long time to perceive clearly its character 
and import.” 

I had been told that Cezanne made a slave of 
his models. I proved it to my own satisfaction 



Paul Cezanne 


133 

from sad experience. From the moment that he 
put down the first brush stroke until the end of 
the sitting, he treated the model like a simple still- 
life. He loved to paint portraits. “The goal of 
all art,” he would say, “is the human face.” If 
he did not paint it more often, the reason lay in 
the difficulty of procuring models who were as 
tractable as I. Consequently, after painting him¬ 
self and his wife many times, and also a few 
obliging friends (at the time that Zola still had 
faith in Cezanne, the future novelist consented 
to pose for the nude)., he resorted to painting 
apples, and even more frequently flowers—flowers 
did not decay: he used paper ones. But “even 
they, confound ’em! faded in the long run.” 
Therefore, in certain moments of exasperation 
against the “contrariness” of things, Cezanne 
would even fall back upon the plates in the Mag- 
asin Pittoresque , of which he possessed some 
bound volumes, or, as a last resort, upon his 
sister’s fashion magazines! Beyond that there 
was left but to hope for a clear gray sky, and to 
dread the barking of dogs, the noise of the pile 


1 


Paul Cezanne 


134 

driver factory, and a few inconveniences of a like 
nature. 

Cezanne had found in me, or so I like to think, 
his ideal model; hence he made no haste to finish 
my portrait. “It makes a good study,” he would 
say, setting to work again on some part that was 
fairly well realized. And he would add, ex¬ 
pecting me to be overwhelmed with joy, “You 
are beginning to learn how to pose.” 

One day when his bad humor had manifested 
itself several times during the sitting, and when 
I had departed after arranging to meet on the 
morrow, Cezanne suddenly said to his son, “The 
sky is turning clear gray. When Monsieur Vol- 
lard has had time to get a bite to eat, run over 
to his place and fetch him back.” 

“But aren’t you afraid that Monsieur Vollard 
will get all tired out?” 

“What difference does that make, as long as 
the weather is good?” 

“But if you exhaust him today, perhaps he 
won’t be able to pose tomorrow.” 


Paul Cezanne 


135 

“You’re right, son. We must spare the model! 
You’ve got the practical view of life.” 

While pretending to deplore his utterly im¬ 
practical outlook on life, Cezanne really prided 
himself upon it privately. One very cold win¬ 
ter, I remember, happening to stop in the middle 
of a bridge to look at the Seine heavy with ice, 
I espied someone washing brushes on the bank 
of the river. It was Cezanne. “The water is 
frozen at the studio,” he shouted. “I hope that 
doesn’t happen here!” and he shot an anxious 
glance at the ice blocks drifting closer and closer 
together. 

While posing for my portrait, I feared above 
all the entrance on the scene of the terrible pal¬ 
ette-knife. With what care did I guard my 
merest words! You may be sure I never spoke 
of painting, nor literature, nor savants, nor 
teachers; in fact, I usually held my peace, lest 
Cezanne, who thought of nothing but his work, 
might misconstrue whatever I said into a desire 
to contradict, and my portrait might momen- 


Paul Cezanne 


136 

tarily run the risk of destruction. I thought it 
most prudent to wait until he spoke to me—but 
even that had its hidden dangers, as we shall 
see. 

Cezanne had said, “You must go to see the 
Delacroix in the Choquet collection; they are up 
for auction.” He mentioned in particular a very 
important water-color of flowers bought by Mon¬ 
sieur Choquet at the Piron sale. Piron had ac¬ 
quired it at the sale which followed the'death of 
Delacroix, whose executor he was. Cezanne in¬ 
formed me that Delacroix, by his last wish, had 
given his heirs the right to choose any picture 
from among his works with the exception of this 
water-color, which was to figure at the sale of his 
effects. Wishing to show Cezanne the interest I 
had taken in his narrative, I looked up Delacroix’s 
will, and the following day when I came to pose, 
I remarked, “I have read Delacroix’s will; he 
actually does mention a large water-color repre¬ 
senting flowers placed, as it were, ‘at random 
against a gray background.’ ” 

“You idiot,” he shouted, taking a couple of 


Paul Cezanne 


137 


steps in my direction and brandishing his fists in 
my face, “don’t you dare say that Delacroix 
painted anything at random!” 

I explained the misunderstanding; he calmed 
down. “I love Delacroix,” he said by way of 
apology. Meanwhile I promised myself to re¬ 
double my precautions in the future. Another 
time, all omens presaged a favorable sitting; the 
sky was “clear gray,” no dogs, silence in the pile- 
driver factory, a good copy the day before at the 
Louvre; and last but not least ha Croix had an¬ 
nounced a victory for the Boers that day. While 
I was rejoicing over these auspicious portents, I 
heard of a sudden a resounding oath, and turning 
around, I saw Cezanne wild-eyed, his palette- 
knife raised over my portrait. I was petrified with 
fear for what might happen; at last, after mo¬ 
ments which seemed like hours, Cezanne turned 
his fury against another canvas, which was in¬ 
stantly reduced to shreds. The reason for his 
wrath, it seems, was this: in a corner of the studio 
opposite to where I was posing, there had always 
been an old faded carpet. On that particular 


Paul Cezanne 


138 

day, unfortunately, the maid had taken it away 
with the laudable intention of beating it. Ce¬ 
zanne explained that it was intolerable not to 
have that carpet in its accustomed place; it would 
be impossible for him to continue my portrait; 
he would never touch a brush again as long as he 
lived. Happily he did not keep his word, but 
the fact remains that he could not paint another 
stroke that day. 

After a hundred and fifteen sittings, Cezanne 
abandoned my portrait to return to Aix. “The 
front of the shirt is not bad”—such were his last 
words on parting. He made me leave the clothes 
in which I posed at the studio, expecting, when 
he returned to Paris, to paint in the two white 
spots on the hands, and then, of course, to work 
over certain parts. “I hope to have made some 
progress by that time. You understand, Mon¬ 
sieur Vollard, the contour keeps slipping away 
from me!” But he had not counted on the moths, 
“the little wretches!” which devoured my clothes 
in short order. 


Paul Cezanne 


139 


When Cezanne laid a canvas aside, it was al¬ 
most always with the intention of taking it up 
again, in the hope of bringing it to the point of 
perfection. We can readily understand, then, 
those landscapes, already “classified” and taken 
up again the following year—sometimes even two 
or three years in succession'. This procedure did 
not bother him in the least, since for him, “to 
paint from nature was not a question of copying 
the subject, but solely of realizing his sensations.” 
It is easy to see how, from this unheard-of con¬ 
scientiousness, this perpetual repainting of his 
work, the legend gained credence that he was pow¬ 
erless to realize his visions. Cezanne himself 
did all he could to spread this belief ; he would 
solemnly and with the utmost conviction tell 
you, “I don’t seem to possess the power to real¬ 
ize.” That epitomizes “Cezanne the provincial,” 
darting furtive glances about him,, and imagining 
himself hedged in by enemies whose sole purpose 
in life was to obstruct his admission to the Salon 
of Bouguereau. It was those imaginary enemies 
whom he tried to disarm with a humble, timid 


140 


Paul Cezanne 


mien. What a contrast to “Cezanne the master,” 
who, when someone bumped into him by accident 
one day at work,, shouted furiously: “Don’t you 
know that I’m Cezanne ?” 

His friends bantered him a great deal about his 
obstinate determination to get into the official 
Salons; but we must not forget his conviction that, 
if ever he could slip into the Salon of Bouguereau 
with a “well-realized canvas,” the scales would 
fall from the eyes of the public, and they would 
desert Bouguereau to follow the great artist that 
he felt himself capable of becoming. 

It is only fair to add that every trace of this 
conceit vanished the moment he sat down to his 
easel. Picture him with all his faculties con¬ 
centrated on “the exactness of the form,” search¬ 
ing out the line, with the same conscientiousness 
that the guild apprentices might have lavished on 
the chef cToeuvre which was to bring them their 
mastership. If he were satisfied with a sitting, 
a very unusual occurrence, he shouted like a 
schoolboy who has just received a good mark. 
Therefore it is not hard to understand how great 


Paul Cezanne 


141 

must have been his irritation if he were suddenly 
awakened from his dreams and brusquely brought 
back to earth again. One day when someone had 
disturbed him at his work, and he had slashed up 
one of his pictures, he said to me, “Excuse me, 
Monsieur Vollard, but when I am studying, I 
must have absolute quiet.” 


CHAPTER IX 


THE FINAL RETURN TO AIX 


1899 


W HEN echoes of the stir that Cezanne 
was making in Paris finally reached Aix, 
his compatriots, in their admiration for the ££ queer 
devil” who had succeeded in making the Pari¬ 
sians “sit up and take notice,” began to show some 
esteem for him. They even went so far as to 
seek out his society, with the hope, of course, of 
extorting a canvas or two from him. It might 
turn out to be a good thing; ££ they bring good 
money in Paris now.” 

But all Provencals are distrustful, and Ce¬ 
zanne, who was no exception to the rule, with his 
constant terror of the famous “hooks,” regarded 
their eulogies with suspicion. “Flatterers,” to 
his mind, were even more dangerous than “mud¬ 
slingers.” He once told me in this connection 


142 


Paul Cezanne 


H 3 

that an art critic had sought to do him honor by 
picturing him with his arms thrown around a 
tree and crying with tears in his eyes, “If only I 
could transplant this to my canvas! 5 ’ “Life’s 
frightful, isn’t it, Monsieur Vollard.” His sus¬ 
picions went to such lengths that one day, when 
a boyhood friend happened to meet him at Aix, 
and asked him where he lived, he said hurriedly, 
“I live a long way off, in a street.” Once rid of 
the fellow, he muttered, “The beggar, he tried to 
get his hooks on me!” 

There remained those who were neither fami¬ 
liar nor indiscreet, neither too reverent nor too 
respectful—in a word, all those against whom he 
could harbor no grudge. But even with these it 
was hard for him to find any common ground, so 
great was his natural detachment. One day his 
cab was bringing him back from a motif. Inas¬ 
much as the horse was having difficulty in negoti¬ 
ating a rather steep incline, Cezanne got down 
and walked beside the carriage. When they came 
to a level stretch, the driver whipped up his horse 
and went off at a trot. Meanwhile Cezanne 


144 


Paul Cezanne 


plodded along mechanically, suspecting nothing. 
Imagine the cabby’s stupefaction when he turned 
around and found his carriage empty. “That’s 
the first time I’ve ever lost a fare!” the good fel¬ 
low ejaculated. But he was not so surprised as 
Cezanne by half—he could not for the life of him 
explain what had occurred. 

Another time, in the heat of an argument with 
Solari, a sculptor who lived at Aix, he swallowed 
a whole bottle of cognac without investigating 
the label, under the impression that it was mineral 
water. It goes without saying that the conversa¬ 
tion waxed maudlin. 

One of the rare good memories that Cezanne 
retained of his relations with his fellow men was 
a chance encounter with Monsieur Denys Cochin. 
The latter was out for a horse-back ride with his 
son, Augustin Cochin, in the environs of Paris. 
The young man cried suddenly, “Look, father, 
there’s Cezanne painting in that field over yon¬ 
der.” 

“How do you know it’s Cezanne?” asked the 
father, whose eyes were not as sharp as his son’s. 


Paul Cezanne 


145 

“Because he’s painting a Cezanne!” came the 
prompt reply. They drew nearer, and Cezanne 
who could never endure being disturbed while at 
work, was, contrary to his custom extremely af¬ 
fable. “I could tell at a glance that they were 
'society’ folk,” he told me. But notwithstand¬ 
ing Monsieur Cochin’s cordial invitation to come 
to his house and see his Delacroix and his Ce- 
zannes, the painter could never come to the point 
of making the visit. “I don’t know how to act in 
society,” he protested after he had told me of the 
incident. 

Let us add that his misanthropy did not pre¬ 
vent him from being indulgent towards others if 
he were persuaded that they were not trying to 
“get their hooks on him.” Some friends were 
talking one day in his presence of an Aixois who 
had eaten up his wife’s entire dowry. Cezanne 
was the only one who did not become indignant 
over it. 

“But tell me, can you find a single redeeming 
quality in that man?” asked one of the victim’s 
relatives. 


Paul Cezanne 


146 

“Yes,” replied Cezanne, “I believe he knows 
how to buy olives for the table.’ 5 

Cezanne had that sickening fear of the “hooks” 
to blame for not finishing his portrait of Mon¬ 
sieur Gustave Geffroy. After a great many sit¬ 
tings he abruptly packed up his paint-box and 
easel and skipped off to Aix. One day we were 
talking about Monsieur Geffroy’s writings: 
“You must read his ha Coeur et U Esprit P said 
Cezanne. “Among other fine things in that book 
there is a short-story called Le Sentiment de Vlm- 
possible I ventured to ask him why he never 
saw Monsieur Geffroy any more. He replied > 
‘‘Don’t misunderstand me; Geffroy is a nice 
enough fellow, and he has lots of talent, but he’s 
forever talking about Clemenceau; so I came back 
to Aix to save my life!” 

“Clemenceau is not your sort then*?” I asked. 

“It’s not that, Monsieur Vollard! He has 
temperament; but for a man like me, who is help¬ 
less in this life, it’s safer to lean on Rome!” 

It was no affliction to Cezanne that nature 
should have denied him the gift of normal so- 


1 


Paul Cezanne 


147 

ciability; his wife, his son, and his sister Marie 
were all he asked for. And then, were not the 
good red soil, the verdant pines, and the blue 
hills of his own Provence treasures more precious 
than all humanity put together'? There in Prov¬ 
ence he hoped to end his days, and there, in fact, 
he retired definitely towards the end of the year 

t 

1899, scarcely a day after he ceased work on my 
portrait. 

When he had decided to reside at Aix for good, 
thus fleeing the society of his kind, he made the 
resolve to imitate the more “proper” people of 
the town, and if circumstances should oblige him 
to mingle with other people, to take some pains 
about his personal appearance—at least if he 
should think of it at all—and always compel him¬ 
self to behave before compatriots and stranger 
alike with imperturbable politeness. From now 
on the only thing that could provoke a change in 
his attitude was an attack directed against some 
painter that he admired, or else praise of Dubufe, 
Robert Fleury, or some other artist of the same 
stripe. He had always been incorrigible in that 



Paul Cezanne 


148 

respect. His weakness never showed itself to 
better advantage than in the course of the parleys 
preceeding a duel in which Zola came near being 
embroiled in his youth, and at which Cezanne and 
Guillemet acted as witnesses. The latter, who 
was not unaware of the danger of bringing Ce¬ 
zanne face to face with painters whom he scorned, 
had hastened to catechize him and enjoin upon 
him the utmost moderation in the company of 
Olivier Merson and another master of the same 
school, who were the witnesses for the other 
party. To these wise counsels, however,; Ce¬ 
zanne invariably replied: “They all give me a 
pain! 75 Nevertheless, everything went smoothly 
enough. A conciliatory letter, in which Zola 
made fun of his adversary in the most agreeable 
manner in the world, had been presented by his 
seconds and accepted, unquestioned. Embold¬ 
ened by this apparent success, Olivier Merson 
took Zola to task for the opinions he set forth on 
art in the papers. His gorge rose a little at 
Zola’s audacity in attacking such painters as 


Paul Cezanne 


149 

Bonnat, Cabanel, Fromentin and others. Guil¬ 
lemet had hardly had time to call Merson’s at¬ 
tention to the fact that it was none of his busi¬ 
ness, when Cezanne, who up to that moment had 
been busy scratching the calf of his leg and had 
taken no part in the conversation, jumped up 
furious. 

“I say to hell with Cabanel !” 

As soon as they were outside, he took Guille¬ 
met to task: “We were too damned soft. 
You’re strong, why didn’t you knock him down?” 

Timid and helpless in the ways of the world, 
Cezanne rather distrusted soldiers on leave. 
But these same soldiers, kept well in hand, and 
ready without cavil to march against enemies 
from without as well as from within, seemed to 
him a blessing from on high. Of course his love 
for his dear army had made him anti-Dreyfus. 
Accordingly, after Rodin had published a letter 
deploring the fact that there were none but Drey¬ 
fus supporters among the subscribers to his statue 
of Balzac, Cezanne almost came to the point of 


150 


Paul Cezanne 


sending in a subscription himself. “That chap 
Rodenn has the right idea. He’s a good fellow; 
he ought to be encouraged.” 

Likewise he could not tolerate the clergy from 
the very day that he had met with a “scound¬ 
relly abbot,” a “dirty cassock” who played the 
organ at Saint-Sauveur, and, what was worse, 
played off key. “I can’t attend mass any more,” 
he said, “on account of that dirty hound. His 
playing makes me positively ill.” 

Although Cezanne did his best to avoid priests 
as a class, he felt that religion had its good points, 
that it made for “respectability,” and provided a 
“moral support.” Therefore he went to the 
churches and attended mass on Sunday. From 
early childhood he had evinced decidedly con¬ 
servative tendencies. One day his father had 
said jokingly to a friend, “We are having dinner 
a little late today. It’s Sunday, so the ladies 
have gone to eat the Lord God.” Whereupon 
the son, customarily so subdued, flared up boldly 
against the author of his days: “It’s easy to see 
that you read Le Siecle , with its wine-merchant 


Paul Cezanne 


151 

politics!” When it happened, however, that on 
Sunday the sky was clear gray, the curate had to 
get along without Cezanne. 

He never ceased to dream about his painting, 
even at mass. A young artist had made a pil¬ 
grimage to Aix to try to see the master. It hap¬ 
pened to be Sunday. One of the young man’s 
friends, who was acting as his guide, conducted 
him, as a matter of course, to Saint Sauveur, where 
mass was just letting out. When Cezanne had 
been pointed out to him, the youthful disciple 
rushed up to the master. Thus unexpectedly ac¬ 
costed, Cezanne was as frightened as a rudely 
awakened sleeper. The surprise was so great that 
he dropped his prayer book. But as soon as the 
other had told Cezanne that he was a painter, 
the master cried, “Ah! so you’re one of us?” 

and was as amiable as could be. Then suddenlv 

* 

clutching a button on the young man’s jacket, he 
said earnestly: “Listen! Everything in Na¬ 
ture is a cylinder or a cube.” A moment later: 
“Look!” and he pointed to a beam of sunlight 
reflected in a tiny stream that ran through the 


152 


Paul Cezanne 


square, “how would you paint that 4 ? You must 
be on your guard against the Impressionists,. I 
tell you. Just the same, they know how to see!” 

Notwithstanding his strong religious senti¬ 
ments, Cezanne would consign the Almighty to 
the nethermost Hell on the merest pretext, unless 
some other victim upon whom he could vent his 
anger happened to be within reach. I recall one 
day that the fog had driven him out of the studio 
while he was painting my portrait. Just as he 
was about to take the name of the Lord in vain, 
he remembered that Carriere was his next door 
neighbor; whereupon he shook his fist at his con¬ 
frere’s windows, pretending to be furious, but 
with an anticipatory twinkle in his eye. “He’s in 
luck—it’s ideal weather for Carriere to give him¬ 
self up to one of his orgies of color!” 

Cezanne was as delighted as a child with these 
cheap little remarks. A long time ago when the 
slang phrase of the day was “Ho there, Lam¬ 
bert!” he espied, while strolling in the environs 
of Paris,, a genial painter of cats, with whom he 


Paul Cezanne 


153 


was acquainted. His name happened to be Lam¬ 
bert. Feeling in the mood for a little joke, he 
cried: “Ho there Lambert,” putting, or at least 
intending to put, a damper in his voice. The 
other wheeled about, and naturally enough started 
towards him. Cezanne, frightened out of his 
wits, and thinking that he had a fight on his 
hands, picked up a stone and made ready to de¬ 
fend his life at any cost. Lambert advanced smil¬ 
ing, his hand outstretched, happy to have found 
someone he knew. “Don’t pay any attention to 
those guttural noises that come from my throat,” 
said Cezanne. Lambert would have none of his 
excuses, and shook hands heartily. They walked 
along together, but Cezanne was on his guard. 
When one is “helpless in the ways of the 
world. . . .” 


j 


CHAPTER X 


CEZANNE AND ZOLA 

C EZANNE had spoken to me of certain 
canvases of his youth that he had given to 
Zola. I was very anxious to see them. Mon¬ 
sieur Mirbeau, to whom I had mentioned my de¬ 
sire, expressed his willingness to give me a letter 
of introduction to Zola. In the letter, however, 
he refrained from speaking of the pictures. 
“Zola is so jealous of them that I dare not ask 
him to show them to you,” he said. Mirbeau 
merely explained in his letter that I was in search 
of a suitable type-face for a coming edition of 
the Jar din des Supplies s, and that I should be 
greatly indebted if Zola would show me a testi¬ 
monial recently sent to him by a group of Belgian 
adherents of Dreyfus, and printed with the cele¬ 
brated Plantin type. 

When I arrived at Zola’s house, I was con- 

154 


Paul Cezanne 


155 

ducted through an entrance-hall in which was dis¬ 
played an immense composition by Debat-Pon- 
san, representing Truth Arising from the Well. 
It bore the legend Nec mergitur , and was in¬ 
scribed: “Truth, raising her mirror, strives to 
emerge from the well, but is held back by the 
hypocrisy of Basile and the rude hand of Brutal 
Force.” Presently I was ushered into a drawing¬ 
room filled with objects of piety. The light came 
in through two glass windows, one representing 
scenes from mythology, and the other showing 
Coupeau cutting a loaf of bread. I could not 
help but admire such eclecticism. A delicious 
calm pervaded the place, and I understood for the 
first time the grandeur of Zola’s sacrifice when he 
left this exquisite home to defend Innocence, 
in the infested atmosphere of public meetings. 

The master appeared presently, clasping to his 
breast the much adored Pinpin, one of the ugliest 
and most quarrelsome little dogs that I have ever 
seen* and holding in his disengaged hand a copy 
of La Debacle. He caught me stealing a glance 
at Coupeau; his countenance was benevolent. 


Paul Cezanne 


156 

“Ah yes, the Plantin type,” he said, after he 
had acquainted himself with the contents of my 
letter of introduction. “I shall try to put my 
hand on that testimonial from my Belgian ad¬ 
mirers; but I receive so many testimonials, from 
all corners of the globe; it is quite possible that 
some of them may have been lost. In any case, 
you will have no difficulty in finding a type at 
any of our great modern type-founders that is 
just as good, perhaps even better. It is incredible 
that, since the days of Plantin,, the art of print¬ 
ing could alone have been out of harmony with 
the progress which is being manifested in all the 
other arts.” 

I refrained from turning the trend of the con¬ 
versation toward the Cezannes as yet, fearing to 
awaken Zola’s suspicions. My game was to lead 
the master to speak of them himself. I ventured 
to express my admiration for the objects which 
adorned the salon. 

“And my Debat-Ponsan*?” he interrupted. 
“The thing that makes that Truth Arising from 
the Well , so moving, is that one can fairly hear 


Paul Cezanne, 


157 


the conscience of an honest man crying out. 
When the painter was presented to me, and I 
expressed my admiration for his work, he said to 
me with tears in his eyes, ‘I was so intent upon 
revealing the naked soul of the abominable Basile 
that I never realized that at the same time I was 
painting the most successful canvas of my artistic 
career. The credit is not due to me; it was not 
my hand but my heart that guided my brush.’ 
Ah! that man is more than a great painter, he 
is a fine character who has become a great painter; 
and it is because he is a fine character that great 
genius has come to him. What a lesson for art¬ 
ists who fail to put their manhood first! They 
never paint masterpieces, because it is with the 
heart’s blood that one writes, paints, carves, a 
great work. . . .” 

Myself (timidly) : It seems to me that the 
figure of Truth, and even Basile, have already be¬ 
gun to blacken a little. 

Zola: The greatest masters blacken in the 
long run. Should we cease to admire them on 
that account*? 


Paul Cezanne 


158 

I went over to examine an ivory angel which 
was suspended from the ceiling by means of a 
fine wire. With its wings outstretched, it gave 
the illusion that it was flying of its own accord. 

“What a lovely angel!” I exclaimed. 

Zola: It is said to be thirteenth century, but I 
assure you that I don’t bother myself about 
periods or styles. An artist demands of an ob¬ 
ject of art simply that it should give him pleasure, 
nothing more. 

Myself: It is almost like a museum here. 

Zola: Before writing a book, I always gather 
a store of material. It was in the company of 
these countless charming nothings that I wrote Le 

Reve. 

Myself: Did you discover all these treasures 
in Paris? 

Zola: I did not have to go far afield. The 
entire crop was harvested in my neighborhood at 
very fair prices. Opportunities are always pre¬ 
senting themselves, but so few people know how 
to see! 

Myself (perceiving, in a pretty, up-to-date 


Paul Cezanne 


159 

frame, a portrait of a young girl warming a tiny 
bird between her bared breasts) : The influence 
of Greuze? 

Zola: Connoisseurs have even attributed it to 
Greuze. 

Myself (discovering, in the neighborhood of 
the girl with the bird, a picture representing a 
group of nude female figures suspended from the 
vault of Heaven by means of silver chains) : Ary 
Scheffer? 

Zola: It is one of the masterpieces of that 
passionate lover of the ideal who painted nothing 
but masterpieces: the Corneille of painting, a per¬ 
fect companion to its Racine, our own Greuze. 

Zola’s face beamed with such good will that I 
ventured to speak about Cezanne. 

“There is a question on the tip of my tongue, 
Master, but I have already abused your hospital¬ 
ity to such an extent. . . .” 

Zola (indulgently): Speak! 

Myself: It is about the letters that you wrote 
to Monsieur Cezanne, and which are so indispen¬ 
sable to the world today, to teach it to feel and 


i6o 


Paul Cezanne 


to think. Are they still in existence^ I have not 
dared to speak to Monsieur Cezanne about them, 
because I did not want to give him reason for 
eternal remorse; for, if he had not preserved those 
precious papers, he would have been over¬ 
whelmed with the realization of how basely he 
had betrayed the confidence of posterity. 

Zola: I too was afraid for those letters. I 

« 

gave the best of myself in them! But thanks 
be to Heaven, Cezanne had sense enough to 
treasure the merest note that I wrote him with 
the greatest care. When I asked him to give me 
back my correspondence, thinking that its publi¬ 
cation might prove to be invaluable to young art¬ 
ists, who could not fail to profit by the advice 
that a friend gave to a friend from the bottom 
of his heart, he returned the package—not a let¬ 
ter was missing. Ah! why did he not also give 
me the great painter upon whom I counted so 
much! 

Myself: What confidence you must have 
placed in Monsieur Cezanne! 

Zola: His comrades were ready enough to 



Courtesy of M. Ambroise Vollard 

MME. CEZANNE WITH THE GREEN HAT ( 1888 ) 



Paul Cezanne 


161 


set him down as a failure, but I told them over 
and over again: “Paul has the genius of a great 
painter.” Ah! why was I not a good prophet 4 ? 

Myself: But Monsieur Cezanne was a terrific 
worker, and besides he had the imagination of a 
poet! 

Zola: Dear big Cezanne had the divine 
spark! But, if he had the natural genius of a 
great painter, he did not have the persistence to 
become one. He lost himself too much in his 
dreams, dreams that were never fulfilled. To 
use his own words, he gave himself to be nursed 
by illusions! 

Myself: Have you any pictures by Mon¬ 
sieur Cezanne 4 ? 

Zola: I have hidden them away in the coun¬ 
try. At the suggestion of Mirbeau, who wanted 
to see them, I had them sent back here. But I 
could never put them on the walls. My house, 
you understand, is the rendezvous of artists. 
You know how fair-minded they are, yet severe 
with each other. I could not bear to leave my 
best friend, the companion of my youth, to their 


162 


Paul Cezanne 


tender mercies. Cezanne’s pictures are under 
triple lock and key in a cupboard, safe from mis¬ 
chievous eyes. Do not ask me to get them out; 
it pains me so to think of what my friend might 
have been if he had only tried to direct his imag¬ 
ination and work out his form. One may be 
born a poet, but a good workman has to be 
made. 

Myself: I presume, Master, that you gave 
him the benefit of your advice and wide experi¬ 
ence? 

Zola: I did everything to bring dear old Ce¬ 
zanne back to his senses; the letters that I wrote 
to him moved me so deeply that I can remember 
them word for word. It was he who inspired 
VOeuvre. The public went mad over the book, 
but Cezanne was indifferent. After that nothing 
could bring him out of the clouds; he withdrew 
more and more from the work-a-day world. . . . 

These last words, uttered in a trembling voice, 
were followed by a silence. 

Myself: But even if he was never able to 
“realize” his ideas, perhaps Monsieur Cezanne 


Paul Cezanne 163 

said some interesting things about painting in his 
letters? 

Zola (putting down his little dog tenderly) : 
Everything that Cezanne wrote was unexpected 
and original. But I have not kept his letters. I 
would not, for the world, have anyone else read 
them, on account of their somewhat loose 
form. . . . 

Myself (interrupting): There again your 
friendship. . . . 

Zola: All that is so long ago! In reply to 
one of those missives of his—so pungent with 
the sweet fragrance of Provence, I remember writ¬ 
ing to him: “I love those strange thoughts of 
yours; they are so like young gipsy girls with 
their quaint glances, their muddy feet, and their 
glorious, flower-crowned heads.” But I could 
not help adding, “Our sovereign master, the Pub¬ 
lic, is not so easy to satisfy. He says c fie upon 
princesses dressed in rags. ... To win grace 
in his eyes it is not sufficient merely to say some¬ 
thing—one must say it well/ ” 

At this juncture a crowd of children trooped 


Paul Cezanne 


164 

by the windows of Zola’s house, shouting “Down 
with Zola, down with Dreyfus!” I said politely, 
“The little wretches!” and the diminutive dog 
yapped furiously. But Zola’s face was bland 
with the serenity of a martyr marching to the 
sacrifice. 

“No, not wretches, just poor misguided souls, 
blind with too much light! No more can the 
owl see at high noon!” 

And burying his face in Pinpin’s fur, he cooed 
to the dog, “You’re not wicked, are you 4 ?” Then 
he murmured, “They have eyes and they see 

nr 

not; ears they have and they hear not. . . .” 

Myself: It is not blindness alone that one 
deplores in one’s enemies, Master. There is 
hate, deliberate hate. . . . 

Zola: Yes, hate. I have been made very 
unhappy by it—I who should so have liked to be 
beloved of all! 

Myself: Master, you have the elite of the 
thinkers on your side. 

Zola: But the crowd rejects me. 

Myself: The serpents of envy are not long 


Paul Cezanne 


165 

lived. The day will come when their eyes will 
be unsealed. Already I have heard the cry: 
“Long live Zola!” 

Zola: Perhaps tomorrow the same ones will 
hiss me. 

Myself: But remember, your editions are 
running up to one hundred and fifty thousand 
copies. 

Zola: That’s nothing to the editions of a 
million copies that Jules Mary gets in Le Petit 
Journal. 

And Zola, a far-away look in his eyes, mur¬ 
mured to himself, ( ‘Le Petit Journal , a million 
copies!” 

In order to give a more cheerful turn to this 
depressing subject, I recounted what I had been 
told of the huge sales of his La Debacle in for¬ 
eign countries. Zola replied, “That, of all my 
books, has been most appreciated by the public./ 

Myself: Is it the one you like the best, Mas¬ 
ter*? 

Zola: An artist always prefers the thing he 
is going to do. But I must admit that I have 


i66 


Paul Cezanne 


a warm place in my heart for La Debacle; the 
sales have reached the two-hundred-thousand 
mark. 

With these words I took leave of Cezanne’s 
illustrious friend. 

Zola’s death in 1902 affected Cezanne very 
deeply. The first news of it reached him when 
he was at his studio in Aix, in the act of setting 
his palette. Paulin, a former boxer, who served 
Cezanne in the dual capacity of servant and 
model, burst into the room and cried: “Mon¬ 
sieur Paul, Monsieur Paul, Zola is dead!” Ce¬ 
zanne burst into tears. He motioned the model 
away and locked himself in. Although not 
daring to knock, Paulin came to the door from 
time to time and listened. His master wept and 
sobbed all day long. 

The Cezannes which were found when Zola’s 
cupboards and granary were emptied were sent 
to the Hotel Drouot, along with the indiscrimi¬ 
nate mass of antiquities which embellished his 
salon. The sale took place in March, 1903. It 


Paul Cezanne 167 

is worthy of note that one of Zola’s admirers bid 
Truth Arising from the Well up to three hundred 
and fifty francs. 

Rochefort, ill-informed on this point, and imag¬ 
ining that Zola admired the art of Cezanne, 
launched a scathing attack in ITntransigeant 
against this kind of painting, and withered the 
eccentricities of the deceased with his most caus¬ 
tic irony. 1 The article concluded as follows: 
“Seeing Nature through the eyes of Zola and his 
painter-associates, is like seeing patriotism and 
honor in the guise of an officer betraying the de¬ 
fenses of his country to the enemy.” 

I recall an amusing incident in this connection. 
Cezanne fils had written to his father that he had 
put Rochefort’s article aside for his perusal. Ce¬ 
zanne replied: “Don’t bother to send it. I find 
it thrust under my door every day, and any num¬ 
ber of copies come by every post.” 

One day Cezanne was showing me a little por¬ 
trait of Zola painted in the period of his youth, 


1 March 9, 1903. 


i68 


Paul Cezanne 


about the year i860. I seized the opportunity 
to ask him at what period Zola and he had broken 
with each other. “No harsh words ever passed 
between us,” he replied. “It was I who stopped 
going to see Zola. I was not at my ease there 
any longer, with the fine rugs on the floor, the 
servants, and Emile enthroned behind a carved 
wooden desk. It all gave me the feeling that I 
was paying a visit to a minister of the state. He 
had become (excuse me, Monsieur Vollard—I 
don’t say it in bad part) a dirty bourgeois.” 

Myself: I should think it must have been 
frightfully interesting to meet Edmond de Gon- 
court, the Daudets, Flaubert, Guy de Maupas¬ 
sant and all those people at Zola’s house. 

Cezanne: Oh, there were plenty of people 
there, but the things they talked about made me 
sick. I tried to arouse interest in Baudelaire 
once, but nobody cared anything about him. 

Myself: Then what did they talk about*? 

Cezanne: Each one talked about the number 
of copies he had had printed of his last book, or 
how many he hoped to have printed of his next. 


Paul Cezanne 


169 

Of course, they exaggerated a little. But 
you should have heard the women! Mme. X. 
would say proudly, casting a defiant look at 
Mme. Z.: “My husband and I have figured that 
the last novel, with the illustrated editions and 
the 'popular edition,’ has reached thirty-five 
thousand copies.” “And we,” Madame Z. would 
say taking up the challenge, “we are promised by 
contract an edition of fifty thousand copies for 
our next book, not counting the edition de luxe.” 

Myself: Were they all authors of best sellers 
or vain wives'? Surely Edmond de Gon- 
court. . . . 

Cezanne: No, he was never vulgar about it; 
but just the same, he made a wry face whenever 
he heard a new record! 

Myself: Do you like the Goncourts 4 ? 

Cezanne: I used to like Manette Salomon 
very much, but I have never read any Goncourt 
since the "widow,” as Barbey d’Aurevillv called 
him, began to write alone. 

At that time I went to see Zola only on rare 
occasions—it distressed me to watch him grow so 


Paul Cezanne 


170 

stupid. Then one day a servant told me that 
his master was not at home—not to anybody. 
I don’t know whether the instructions were meant 
for me in particular, but I went still less fre¬ 
quently. . . . And then Zola wrote VOeuvre. . . . 

Cezanne was silent for a moment, overwhelmed 
by the past. He continued. 

“You can’t ask a man to talk sensibly about 
the art of painting if he simply doesn’t know 
anything about it. But by God!”—and here 
Cezanne began to tap on the table like a deaf 
man—“how can he dare to say that a painter 
is done for because he has painted one bad pic¬ 
ture? When a picture isn’t realized, you pitch 
it in the fire and start another one!” 

As he talked, Cezanne paced up and down the 
studio like a caged animal. Suddenly seizing 
a portrait of himself he tried to tear it to pieces; 
but his palette knife had been mislaid, and his 
hands were trembling violently. So he rolled 
the canvas up, broke it across his knee, and flung 
it in the fireplace. 


Paul Cezanne 


171 


Myself: But Zola talked to me about you at 
such length and in such affectionate terms. . . . 
I don’t understand. . . . 

Cezanne looked at me with sorrowful eyes. 
The destruction of his canvas had calmed him. 
His anger had given away to pain. 

“Listen, Monsieur Vollard, I must tell you. 
Although I stopped going to see Zola, I never got 
used to the idea that our friendship was a thing 
of the past. When I moved next door to him, 
in Rue Ballu, it had been many moons since we 
had seen each other; but living so near to him I 
hoped that chance would bring us together often, 
—perhaps he would even come to see me. . . . 
Later, when I was in Aix I heard that Zola 
had arrived in town. I presumed that he would 
not dare to look me up of course; but why not 
bury the hatchet? Think of it, Monsieur Vollard, 
Zola was in Aix! I forgot everything—even that 
book of his, 1 even that damned wench, the maid, 
who used to look daggers every time I scraped my 


1 L’Oeuvre. 


172 


Paul Cezanne 


shoes on the matting before entering Zola’s draw¬ 
ing room. When I heard the good news, I was 
in the held, working on a fine motif; it wasn’t 
going badly either; but I chucked the picture and 
everything else—Zola was in Aix! Without 
even taking time to pack up my traps, I rushed 
to the hotel where he was stopping. But on the 
way, I ran into a friend. He informed me that 
some one had said to Zola on the previous day, 
'Aren’t you going to take a meal or two with Ce¬ 
zanne before you go?’ and Zola had answered, 
'What do I want to see that dead one again 
for?’ So I went back to my work.” 

Cezanne’s eyes were full of tears. He blew his 
nose to hide his emotion. 

' Zola was not spiteful, Monsieur Vollard, but 
his life was circumscribed by events.” 

To change the subject, I asked him, "Why did 
Zola want to become a member of the Academie 
Frangaise?” 

Cezanne: The real cause dates a long way 
back. After the appearance of /’Oeuvre there 
was a quarrel between Zola and Edmond de Gon- 


Paul Cezanne 


*73 

court. Zola was ostensibly forgiven, but Gon- 
court scratched him off of the list for his Acad¬ 
emy. In order to get back at him, Zola wanted 
to become a member of the other academy. If 
they had accepted him, he would have been quite 
contented, for then he wouldn’t have had to mix 
up with that Dreyfus affair in order to make the 
world open its mouth and gape. He didn’t know 
much about the Dreyfus argument any way. But 
when a man is a bit “thin,” he always tries to 
bite off more than he can chew. You’ve got to 
have “temperrammennte” to succeed in this 
world, Monsieur Vollard! 

Myself: But what did Goncourt find to take 
offense at in /’ Oeuvre? 

Cezanne: He objected to the title that Zola 
had used. He pretended that the word VOeuvre 
belonged to him and to his dead brother, because 
they had written VOeuvre de Frangois Boucher! 

Cezanne began to laugh heartily; then, his 
eyes twinkling with malice, he chuckled, “Art¬ 
ists are never such asses as that, are they Mon¬ 
sieur Vollard?” 


174 


Paul Cezanne 


For the sake of argument, I mentioned the case 
of Rosa Bonheur, who, to avoid competition, for¬ 
bade her poor relatives, whom she aided liberally 
enough in other ways,, to paint animals in the 
foregrounds of their landscapes. 

Cezanne had pricked up his ears at the men¬ 
tion of an obstacle in the path of a painter’s 
progress. But such a hindrance, in his eyes, was 
not calculated to stop anybody from painting. 
It was quite enough to have “temperram- 
mennte.” 

Fie asked me what the collectors thought of 
Rosa Bonheur. I replied that they usually 
agreed that Nivernaise Husbandry was quite 
fine. “Yes,” countered Cezanne, “it’s horribly 
realistic.” 


CHAPTER XI 


THE LAST YEARS 

(1899-I906) 

C EZANNE would have liked very much to 
have been decorated, but he never could 
come to the point of making overtures in his own 
favor, in spite of the immense pleasure it would 
have given him to “have the laugh on the Insti¬ 
tute crowd” and the people of Aix. 

In 1902 Monsieur Mirbeau—he could not for 
the life of him have told why—decided to sound 
Monsieur Rujon, then director of the Beaux-Arts, 
on the subject of a cross for Cezanne. Mirbeau 
had no sooner said that he was pleading the cause 
of a certain painter for the cross than the super¬ 
intendent, presuming that his visitor had the 
judgment not to demand the impossible, reached 
for the drawer which contained the ribbons com¬ 
mitted to his keeping. But the name of Cezanne 


17s 


Paul Cezanne 


176 

made him jump. “Ah! Monsieur Mirbeau, 
while I am director of the Beaux-Arts I must fol¬ 
low the taste of the public and not try to antici¬ 
pate it! Monet if you wish. Monet doesn’t 
want it? Let us say Sisley, then. What! he’s 
dead? How about Pissarro?” Then, misinter¬ 
preting Monsieur Mirbeau’s silence: “Is he dead 
too? Well then, choose whomever you wish. 
I don’t care who it is, as long as you do me the 
favor of not talking about Cezanne again!” 

Thus the master lost his only opportunity of 
being decorated by the Beaux-Arts. He consoled 
himself by working more furiously than ever, 
with the hope of some day breaking down the 
barriers to the Salon of Bouguereau. He wrote 
to me: 


Aix, April 2, 1902 
Dear Monsieur Vollard: 

I find myself obliged to postpone sending 
your painting of roses until a later date. Al¬ 
though I should have liked very much to have 
sent something to the Salon of 1902, I must 
let another year go by before carrying out my 



Courtesy of M. Ambroise Vollard 

GIRL WITH A DOLL (1894) 





Paul Cezanne 


177 


intention, for I am not satisfied as yet with the 

\ 

results obtained. At all events, I am not neg¬ 
lecting my work. It makes heavy demands 
upon me, but I like to believe that it will not be 
sterile. I have had a studio built upon a bit 
of land which I acquired for the purpose and 
I am pursuing my researches there. As soon 
as I am satisfied that they have born fruit, 
I shall inform you of the results. 

Believe me, most cordially yours, 

Paul Cezanne 

A few months later I received another letter: 

Aix, January 9, 1903 
Dear Monsieur Vollard: 

I work obstinately, and once in a while I 
catch a glimpse of the Promised Land. Am I 
to be like the great leader of the Hebrews, or 
will I really attain unto it? 

If my canvas is ready by the end of February, 
I shall send it to you to be framed and sent to 
some friendly haven. 

I have had to lay aside your canvas of flow¬ 
ers ; I am not satisfied with it. I have a large 
studio in the country. I can work better there 
than in the city. 


i 7 8 


Paul Cezanne 


I have made some progress. Oh, why so 
late and so painful! Must Art indeed be a 
priesthood, demanding that the faithful be 
bound to it body and soul? I regret the dis¬ 
tance that separates us, for more than once I 
have wished for your moral support. I live 

alone; the-s and the-s are unbearable; 

good Lord* they are intellectuals of the worst 
stripe. If I live long enough, we shall talk 
that all over. Many thanks for your good 
wishes. 

Paul Cezanne 

In 1904 Monsieur Roger Marx, an inspector 
of the Beaux-Arts, who was aware that Cezanne 
coveted the cross, but realized full well that there 
was nothing to be expected from the Minister, 
tried to secure him a decoration, at the time of 
the Universal Exposition at Saint Louis, from the 
Minister of Commerce and Industry. But the 
pictures had to pass a jury first, before being sent 
to America. Cezanne’s champion, anxious to 
forestall any possible pretext for refusing the 
picture which was to be submitted delegated me 




Paul Cezanne 


179 

to choose from among his works the most ‘'rea¬ 
sonable” canvas that I knew. I proposed My 
Garden , which had figured in the Centennial dur¬ 
ing the Paris Exposition of 1900. A new ob¬ 
stacle: those members of the jury who belonged 
to the old school—and they were decidedly in 
the majority—remembered with bitterness that 
the organizer of the Centennial, the self-same 
Roger Marx, had in that instance accepted for 
exhibition three canvases by Cezanne, whereas he 
had admitted but one work apiece by equally in¬ 
disputable artists such as Cabanel and Bougue- 
reau. Needless to say,, My Garden was rejected 
unanimously. 

In the same year, 1904, the Salon d’Automne 
devoted an entire room to Cezanne. Puvis de 
Chavannes also had a separate salon. One of 
the newspapers, in reviewing the show, deplored 
the fact that the exhibitors were listed in the 
catalogue in alphabetical order, thus placing Ce¬ 
zanne’s name before that of Puvis! The Press 
was as hostile as ever; but from now on Cezannes 


i8o 


Paul Cezanne 


began to be more and more desirable in the eyes 
of the collectors. He had “arrived” in the ac¬ 
cepted sense of the word. 

In the following season 1 Cezanne again sent 
several canvases to the Salon d’Automne, among 
them the Portrait of Geffroy 1890; Bathers and 
a Bouquet of Roses, done after an engraving 
(these two pictures were part of the Caillebotte 
bequest); The Harvesters, etc. 

About the end of that year, I went to Aix. I 

1 Monsieur Ch. Morice, in his “Inquiry into the present 
tendencies in the plastic arts,” published in Le Mercure de 
France in 1905, put this question before several artists: “How 
do you rate Cezanne?” Here are some of the replies: 

E. Schuffenecker—Cezanne has never painted a picture nor 
has he a single work to his credit. 

Tony Minartz—As for Cezanne, I say nothing and think less, 
for I am not entrusted with the sale of his work. 

M. L. de la Quintinie—Cezanne is a great artist who lacks 
training. 

Gabriel Roby—Cezanne has fine temperament, but he gives 
evidence of no Conscious development. 

Henry Hamm—Cezanne’s evident sincerity intrigues me; his 
clumsiness astonishes me. 

Ouvre—A friend of mine ha9 said, he sees the nude “cross¬ 
eyed.” 

Ignacio Zuloaga—I like Cezanne in his good canvases. 

Fernand Piet—Cezanne? Why Cezanne? 


Paul Cezanne 


181 


found Cezanne reading Athalie. On the easel 
was a still-life, begun several years before, of 
some skulls on an Oriental tapestry. 

“A skull is a beautiful thing to paint!” he ex¬ 
claimed. “Look, Monsieur yollard,” and he 
pointed to the study. 

He based great hopes on that canvas. “I 
think I’m going to realize at last!” he said. 
After a pause: “So Paris thinks my work is 
pretty good, eh? Ah! if Zola were only there, 
now that I’m bowling ’em over with master- 
pieces! 

I told Cezanne that Leon Dierx had asked to 
be remembered to him. “I am very much 

Victor Binet—I have nothing to say about the paintings of 
Cezanne. They look like the work of a drunken night-man. 

Henri Caro-Delvaille—As far as Cezanne is concerned, I 
agree with Puvis de Chavannes: an artist, if left to the mercies 
of sheer instinct, never gets beyond the infant-prodigy stage. 

Maxime Dethomas—I consider Cezanne an agreeable colorist. 

Paul Signac—A still-life by Cezanne or a thumb-box sketch 
by Seurat are just as fine painting as the Mona Lisa. 

Adolphe Willette—I give you my word, I would never sink 
three thousand “bob” in the purchase of three “woolly” apples 
on a dirty plate. 

Albert Bernard—Cezanne? Rubbish! 


182 Paul Cezanne 

touched that Leon Dierx should have kept such 
a warm place in his heart for me/’ he replied. 
“Our acquaintanceship dates back many years. 
I met him for the first time in 1877 at Nina de 
Villard’s in Rue des Moines. Alas! the mem¬ 
ories that are swallowed up in the abyss of the 
years! I’m all alone now; I would never be 
able to escape from the self-seeking of human 
kind anyway. Now it’s theft, conceit, infatua¬ 
tion, and now it’s rapine or seizure of one’s pro¬ 
duction. But Nature is very beautiful. They 
can’t take that away from me!” 

That was my last conversation with Cezanne. 
I never saw him again. 

In spite of a malady 1 from which he had suf¬ 
fered for long, and which had robbed him of much 
of his strength, Cezanne worked away with un¬ 
flagging ardor. Some time before his death, he 
said to one of his friends, “I think I must have 
a blood-clot somewhere in my system.” But a 
letter written to his son about the same time 
bears little trace of such apprehensions. 


1 Diabetes. {Trans. Note) 


Paul Cezanne 183 

Aix, October 15, 1906 

My dear Paul: 

Saturday and Sunday it rained in buckets. 
So the air is much fresher. It isn’t hot either. 
You were quite right when you said that this 
is a “low province.” I still work with diffi¬ 
culty, but I seem to get along. That is the 
important thing to me. Sensations form the 
foundation of my work, and they are imperish¬ 
able, I think. Moreover, I am getting rid of 
that devil who, as you know, used to stand be¬ 
hind me and force me at will to “imitate”; 
he’s not even dangerous any more. 

When you have the chance, say “how do you 
do” to Monsieur and Madame Legoupil, who 
were so kind as to remember me. And don’t 
forget Louis and his family, and Papa Guil¬ 
laume. Time passes with terrifying rapidity. 
My health is not bad. I take care of myself, 
and I have a good appetite. 

I must ask you to order me two dozen eme - 
loncile brushes, like the ones we ordered last 
year. 

I would have to be twenty years younger, 
my dear Paul, to send you as satisfactory news 
as you would like. 


184 


Paul Cezanne 


I repeat, I have a good appetite, but a little 
mental satisfaction would do a lot for me. 
(As far as that goes nothing but work can 
give me that.) All my compatriots are asses 
compared with me. I embrace you and your 
mother. Your old father,, 

Paul Cezanne 

I think the younger painters are much more 
intelligent than the others; to the old ones I 
am just a disastrous rival. 

Your loving father, 

Paul Cezanne 

Two days after Cezanne had written the above 
letter, he was caught in a storm while working in 
the held. Only after having kept at it for two 
hours under a steady downpour did he start to 
make for home; but on the way he dropped ex¬ 
hausted. A passing laundry-wagon stopped, and 
the driver took him home. His old housekeeper 
came to the door. Seeing her master prostrate 
and almost lifeless, her first impulse was to run 
to him and give him every attention. But just 
as she was about to loosen his clothes, she 
stopped, seized with alarm. It must be explained 


Paul Cezanne 185 

that Cezanne could not endure the slightest phys¬ 
ical contact. Even his son, whom he cherished 
above all (“Paul is my horizon,” he used to 
say), never dared to take his father’s arm with¬ 
out saying, “Permit me, papa.” And Cezanne, 
notwithstanding the affection he entertained for 
his son, could never resist shuddering. 

Finally, fearing lest he pass away if he did 
not have proper care, the good woman summoned 
all her courage and set about to chafe his arms 
and legs to restore the circulation, with the re¬ 
sult that he regained consciousness without mak¬ 
ing the slightest protest—which was indeed a bad 
sign. Pie was feverish all night long. 

On the following day he went down into the 
garden, intending to continue a study of a peasant 
which was going rather well. In the midst of 
the sitting he fainted; the model called for help; 
they put him to bed, and he never left it again. 
He died a few days later, on October 22, 1906. 


CHAPTER XII 


Cezanne and the critics 



. K. HUYSMANS, Certains . ... An art¬ 
ist with diseased retinae, who, exasperated 
by faulty vision, has discovered the prodromes 
of a new art.” 

L’Art Franfais, Nov. 23, 1895: . . . Cezanne, 
of the proud line of Gauguin. 

UArt International , Nov. 25, 1895: . . . 
Cezanne comes midway between Puvis de Cha- 

vannes and Van Gogh. 

Revue d’Art , First year 1899, No. 6 (Georges 
Lecomte) : . . . Because Cezanne has no other 
guide but his instincts, he gropes, he hesitates. 
He evidences the awkwardness and imperfection 
of a true primitive. Can he really paint land¬ 
scapes? He grasps their character, their 
color, their light. He translates their intimacy 

and their grandeur, but he runs aground in the 

186 


Paul Cezanne is? 

art of separating his planes, and in giving the 
illusion of distance. His meagre knowledge be¬ 
trays him. 

1. Salon d’Automne of 1904 

Le Journal , Oct. 14, 1904 (Marcel Fouquier) : 
... At first glance, the things that distinguish 
Monsieur Cezanne’s pictures are the awkwardness 
of their design and the heaviness of their color. 
H is much vaunted still-lifes are brutal in han¬ 
dling and dull in effect. It has been predicted 
that they will go one day to the Louvre to keep 
company with Chardin. Happily that day is 
still far distant. 

Le Gaulois , October 14, 1904 (Fourgaud): 
. . . the crude art of Monsieur Cezanne. . . . 

Le Petit Parisien , October 14, 1904 (Valen- 
sol) ... Here is an artist who is sincere; he 
has ardent admirers; doubtless he could paint 
otherwise. . . . But he chooses to daub paint on 
a canvas, and spread it around with a comb or a 
toothbrush. This process produces landscapes, 
marines, still-lifes, portraits ... if he is lucky. 


i88 


Paul Cezanne 


The procedure somewhat recalls the designs that 
school-children make by squeezing the heads of 
flies between the folds of a sheet of paper. 

Le Petit Journal, October 14, 1904: . . . Fin¬ 
ally, to finish up the special rooms, let us say 
that there is one devoted to Monsieur Paul Ce¬ 
zanne, and add nothing further. 

La. Republique Frangaise , October 14, 1904 
(de Bettex) : . . . I shall let Cezanne’s admirers 
pronounce a eulogy upon his method, which may 
be summed up by saying that by planes, he 
sketches heads calculated to beguile the infant 
spectators at the Punch and Judy. ... It takes 
a Goya to paint with mud. 

New York Herald , Paris edition, October 14, 
1904: . . . Cezanne has concocted a still-life; 
varnished apples in unbalanced bowls. They 
say that he is another Chardin; in any case, he 
will have imposed on the younger generation the 
emblematical little green pear. . . . 

La Lanterne , October 15, 1904 (A.M.): 

. . Cezanne! A name which, in the heroic 

days of realism, was the signal for pitched battles! 


Paul Cezanne 


189 

Alas! I fear that this exhibition will put an end 
to the quarrel by demonstrating in a most pre- 
emptory fashion that Cezanne is nothing but a 
lamentable failure. Perhaps he has ideas, but 
he is incapable of expressing them. He seems 
not to know even the first principles of his craft. 

La Revue Illustree, Oct. 15, 1904 (Ponson- 

ailhe) : . . . I was in the act of innocently ad¬ 
miring some apples painted in vigorous tones, 
when one of my very elect friends proposed to 
show me that I had no more of an eye for pic¬ 
tures than a lawyer’s clerk. The marvellous 
thing, mind you, is the geometrical volume of 
the arms and legs in one or two sketches from the 
antique—volume, full of imagination, my ex¬ 
pert assured me. In that respect Monsieur 
Cezanne is a lineal descendant of Phidias. A 
portrait of a man (it looks to me like a gas-fitter 
all decked out for Sunday) connects him with 
Poussin. My spirit is willing enough, but my 
eyes haven’t had the proper training. 

VEclair, Oct. 15, 1904: ... I am at a loss 
to understand the room devoted to the pictures 


Paul Cezanne 


190 

of the painter Cezanne side by side with a room 
devoted to the works of the revered master, Puvis 
de Chavannes. To put two personalities so dif¬ 
ferent from each other (lam being polite) on the 
same footing as attractions,, is not eclecticism— 
it merely shows a lack of tact. 

L’Evenement , Oct. 18, 1904 (Le Senne): 
. . . Cezanne gives the impression of a work¬ 
man of remarkable gifts, but of troubled vision; 
not unskillful, but made to appear unskillful by 
some manual infirmity. 

Le Monde Illustre , Oct. 22, 1904 (Boisard) : 
. . . A kind of art that might have been pro¬ 
duced by a Zulu islander. . . . 

La Revue Hebdomadaire, Oct. 22, 1904 (Pela- 
dan): . . . A curious phenomenon is taking 
place. The artist discards the Masters and, to 
use his own words, observes life. The critic, 
on the other hand, surrounds himself with mas¬ 
terpieces, and has a veritable Pinacothek at home 
composed of prints by Braun. “You spend too 
much time in Rue Louis le Grand/’ 1 said one 

1 Where Braun & Co., is situated in Paris. ( Trans Note) 


Paul Cezanne , 191 

of the exhibitors by way of concluding a dispute 
about Cezanne. What is this art, pray, which 
suffers so grievously from a knowledge of the 
masters, and study of their masterpieces ? 

Encyclopedic Contemporaine , Oct. 25, 1904 
(Benedict): . . . Monsieur Cezanne with his 
contrasting paint and his problematical drawing 
is a painter whom we shall never be able to un¬ 
derstand; the enthusiasm that he had aroused in 
the new school will always be an enigma to us. 

La Petite Gironde , October, 1904: . . . Ce¬ 
zanne is not misunderstood—he is just incom¬ 
plete. We have known him these thirty years. It 
did not require thirty years for others who were 
misunderstood to become celebrated: Millet, 
Daubigny, Theodore Rousseau; nor for them to 
dictate their own terms and to have their tri¬ 
umph. 

Les Debats , Nov. 4, 1904 (Sarradin) : . . . 
I should not know today how to prepare a de¬ 
fense of Cezanne. . . . The impression given by 
all these clumsily daubed portraits is truly pain¬ 
ful; they bear witness to a fatal impotence. 


192 


Paul Cezanne 


This exhibition does considerable wrong to a 
man who, although certainly not a leader of a 
school as some would have him, has at least 
signed some still-lifes and landscapes which, in 
spite of their unskillful execution, one can enjoy 
for their naive talents of observation and color. 

La Revue Bleue , Nov. 5, 1904 (Bouyer): 
. . . . Ah!! Cezanne! “Blessed be the poor in 
spirit, for the kingdom of art is theirs !”. . . 
Come, now, tell us, spoiled as we may be, why 
compose, draw—why paint at all? Why try to 
know , when it is so voluptuous to feel? Why 
talk of education, training, learning, if art is im¬ 
mediate,, impulsive, dumb, and mad like a sav¬ 
age? 

Le Clairon , Nov. 13, 1904 (Norval): . . . 
Paul Cezanne, disconcerting because of annoy¬ 
ing incoherence of drawing and undeniable qual¬ 
ities of paint. 

L’Umvers, Nov. 14, 1904 (Le Say) : . . . The 
works of Paul Cezanne here gathered together are 
more amazing than one could possibly dream; 
they are false, they are brutal, they are mad. 


Paul Cezanne igo 

I say it in a whisper, for it is very dangerous to 
pronounce such an opinion in public; nobody 
knows that better than the poor chap who, at the 
time of the presidential visit, was beaten up be¬ 
cause he did not show sufficient enthusiasm in 
this chamber of horrors. 

La Critique^ Nov. 20, 1904 (A1 canter dc 

Brahm): ... In another room Cezanne has 
his triumph; disciple of the Pissarros and the 
Monets. 

La Revue Libre , November, 1904 (Horus): 
. . . A regrettable error in the catalogue places 
Cezanne before Puvis de Chavannes, on a de¬ 
risive alphabetical pretext. 

2. Salon d’Automne of 1905 

Les Debats , Oct. 5, 1905 (Sarradin): . . . 
There are Cezannes like all other Cezannes. . . . 
Yes. . . . Yes. . . . 

Le Journal , Oct. 17, 1905 (Gustave Geffroy) : 
. . . We must learn not to imitate Cezanne, 
but Cezanne’s scrupulousness in the presence of 
Nature. 


Paul Cezanne 


194 

Echo de Paris , Oct. 17, 1905 (Babin): . . . 
Monsieur Cezanne, with several works repre¬ 
sentative of his undeniable qualities and his too 
evident faults. 

New York Herald, Paris edition, Oct. 17, 1905 
(Weber) : . . . One must be a painter to under¬ 
stand Monsieur Cezanne; one must have acquired 
a distaste for craftsmanship, for tradition, for 
preachments, and for theories. But there is, we 
are told, a superior affirmation of art in Monsieur 
Cezanne’s voluntary ignorance and painful re¬ 
searches. We could readily believe it if this 
sublime ignoramus had not studied the eighteenth 
century painters so much; the high-priest of de¬ 
liberate unskillfulness has no such disdain of 
“imitation.” 

La Republique Fran false, Oct. 17, 1905 (de 
Bettex) : . . . Let us leave others to admire the 
monkeys a la Cezanne, painted with mud, not to 
say worse. 

Le Matin, Oct. 17, 1905: . . . The portrait 
of a woman and the landscapes by Monsieur Paul 


Paul Cezanne 


195 

Cezanne, together with the splendid paintings by 
Monsieur Abel Faivre, deserve to be mentioned in 
the first rank. 

L’Eclair, Oct. 17. 1905 (R. M. Ferry): 
. . . It must at least be admitted that Monsieur 
Cezanne is a painter endowed with singular tal¬ 
ents, but aside from these talents he knows almost 
nothing about the art of painting. 

Le Figaro , Oct. 17, 1905 (Arsene Alexandre) : 
. . . Cezanne, so ably championed nowadays 
that there is nothing left for us to say. 

Le Fetit Journal , Oct. 17, iQny: . . Mon¬ 

sieur Cezanne,, whose work ravishes certain col¬ 
lectors. We do not care to insist upon the point, 
not being one of their number. 

La Liberie , Oct, 17, 1905 (Etienne Charles): 
. . . Are his “Bathers” sincere? If they are, we 
pity the artist—an unconscious mystifier. 

Le XIXe Siecle , Oct. 18, 1905: .. . Among 
the masters of yesterday, we must mention Ce¬ 
zanne, who paints still-life with facility. 

VIntransigeant , Oct. 18, 1905 (D’Anner): 


Paul Cezanne 


196 

. . . Of Monsieur Cezanne I shall say nothing; 
his art—for it seems it is art—is beyond our 
humble comprehension. 

La Petite Gironde , Oct. 18, 19 ° 5 - * • • M° n ‘ 
sieur Cezanne is disconcerting to a mind not fore¬ 
warned. This year I look in vain at his Har - 
vesters , his hideous Bathers, his childish land¬ 
scapes, and I cannot find the mysterious genius 
in them. In vain I cry, “Cezanne show thyself!” 

La Lanterne, Oct. 19,, 19 ° 5 : • • • Wfi at 
use have we now for Monsieur Cezanne"? Is his 
cause really not understood"? Do not all who 
have seen his works consider him an irremediable 
failure? So much the worse for the dealers who 
took Zola’s word and believed that some day 
they would make a clean-up with his works. Let 
Monsieur Vollard accept the inevitable! . . . 

La Revue Bleue , Oct. 21, 1905 (Camille Mau- 
clair) : . . . Monsieur Cezanne exhibits several 
things which are as dull, clumsy, and ugly, but 
also as naive and sincere, as usual. There is 
notably a view of Estaque which travesties that 
adorable panorama of gold and sapphire by mak- 


Paul Cezanne 


197 

ing it a sullen swamp of leaden blue where never 
a ray of sunlight could have shone; also some 
fruit on a dirty cloth, and a scene with unnatural 
nudes. . . . 

Le Petit Dauphinois, Oct. 25, 1905 (Bernard) : 
. . . At the risk of being called a fossil, I must 
permit myself to affirm that in my eyes Ce¬ 
zanne’s Bathers , in which there is neither idea, 
nor drawing, nor color, does not constitute the 
last word in painting. 

Le Chroniqueur Mondain , Oct. 26, 1905 

(Henry Asselin): . . . Cezanne, another of 
the incomprehensibles, who will probably always 
remain a “great man misunderstood,” is the most 
disconcerting of the fantaisistes of genius. 

LaDepeche, Oct. 28, 1905: . . . His Bathers, 
badly arranged and badly modelled, his land¬ 
scapes far too off-hand, can be appreciated only 
by the initiated; I am not one of their number. 

La Revue Hebdomad air e , Oct. 28, 1905 

(Peladan): . . . Monsieur Cezanne sends his 
portrait! What a good man he is! He looks 
like a pensive laborer. Why does he ever try 


igS Paul Cezanne 

to do anything but still-life when he simply 
doesn’t know how? 

Le Tintamarre , Nov. 5, 1905 (Lestrange): 
. . . At the Salon d’Automne the eye must 
needs become eclectic to admire the ingenuous 
art of a Cezanne. 

Journal de Rouen , Nov. 6, 1905 (Nicolle) : 
. . . Pastures and people, a little world all by 
itself clumsily cut out of wood and daubed up 
with cheap and garish colors like the humble toys 
at a bazaar. 

Le Journal des Arts , Nov. 11, 1905 (de Saint- 
Hilaire) : . . . The landscapes of Monsieur Paul 
Cezanne . . . their style redeems a singularly 
puerile and childish character. 

Mercure de France , Dec. 1, 1905 (Ch. Mor- 
ice): . . . Paul Cezanne’s pictures frighten 
the public and delight the artists; all the public, 
not all the artists. I do not think that the af¬ 
finity between Cezanne and a poet would be very 
complete. A painter. Is he a painter in the 
fullest sense of the word? For if he were, the 
affinity between him and a poet would be warm. 


Paul Cezanne 


199 

Art et Decoration , December, 1905 (Francois 
Monod) : . . . Monsieur Cezanne is a belated 
primitive, not a Millet, on a smaller scale, (or, 
other things being equal, a Verlaine of painting), 
but a sort of Crainquebille gifted as a colorist 
who* by dint of isolation and a persistent awk¬ 
wardness, has had a few strokes of good luck. 

La Revue, Dec. 15, 1905 (Camille Mauclair) : 
. . . As for Monsieur Cezanne, his name will 
be connected for all time with the most memo¬ 
rable artistic pleasantry of the past fifteen years. 
It took some of the “cockney impudence” of 
which Mr. Ruskin spoke to invent the “genius” 
of this good old man who paints for his pleasure 
in the provinces and produces heavy, ill-construc¬ 
ted, and conscientiously hap-hazard works: Still- 
life rather good in form but rather crude in 
color, leaden landscapes, figures which a journal¬ 
ist recently described as “michelangelesque,” and 
all of them quite simply the shapeless attempts 
of a man who has more good-will than knowl¬ 
edge. But the eulogies are not all due to 
“cockneys” or simpletons. We find them after 


200 


Paul Cezanne 


the names of men who knew enough to put Car- 
riere and Besnard before the world. . . . Such 
an attitude in the presence of a painter like Mon¬ 
sieur Cezanne constrains one to protest violently 
against him of whom we merely ask not to have 
to say a single word, because he has never pro¬ 
duced what one can call a w T ork. 

3. Salon d’Automne of 1906 

Death of Cezanne (October 22, 1906) 

New York Herald , Paris edition, Oct. 5, 1906 
(Pierre Weber): Monsieur Cezanne has been 
called a “sublime ignoramus.’’ But there is 
some little disagreement about the definition; 
some would omit the “sublime,” and some would 
omit the “ignoramus.” 

Le Gil Bias , Oct. 5, 1906 (Vauxelles): . . . 
To deny that Cezanne is one of the most con¬ 
scientious,, one of the most sober, and one of the 
most obstinately persistent masters of today, is 

to deny the evidence. To treat him as an “in- 

* 

genuous bricklayer,” a fierce and bizarre ima- 


201 


Paul Cezanne 

\ 

gier,” 1 who "sees nature cross-eyed,” 2 is no 
longer tenable. Really, the joke has lasted too 
long. On the other hand, who the devil thinks of 
denying his defects? Irregularity, violent con¬ 
trasts, unskillfulness; wrapped forms, back¬ 
grounds that come forward, planes that pitch and 
toss; portraits of crooked ugly louts. We know 
all that. But has Rubens taste; has Renoir 
ideas? 

La Republique Frangaise , Oct. 5, 1906 (de 
Bettex) : . . . Cezanne’s portraits would tickle 
one’s ribs at a Punch and Judy show. 

La Liber te, Oct. 7, 1906 (Etienne Charles) : 
. . . Monsieur Cezanne scorns the graces of 
color and form. 

Le Figaro , Oct. 25, 1906 (Arsene Alexandre) : 
. . . What strikes every impartial observer on 
examining a canvas by Cezanne, is, apart from 
the incontestable nobility of the conception and 
df the "point of departure,” an absolute impo- 

1 Imagier d’Epinal. A maker of naive but expressive wood- 
cuts that are printed in colors. {Trans. Note) 

2 Literally “sees nature hump-backed.” 


202 


Paul Cezanne 


tence to arrive at his goal. Only those arrive at 
their goal who can express and perpetuate the 
emotion that they have felt. Art cannot be en¬ 
riched simply by good intentions. 

Le Temps , Oct. 25, 1906 (Thiebault-Sisson) : 
. . . To tell the truth, his pictures are little more 
than sketches. It is not so much from negligence 
or willfulness as it is due to the conformation 
of his eye which will not permit him to push the 
most promising sketch to a conclusion. 

Le Gaulois , Oct. 25, 1905: . . . Paul Ce¬ 
zanne, the revolutionary pleinairiste has just 
passed away. . . . His artistic education, (one 
can hardly believe it) was obtained entirely in 
the Louvre, where he spent many long years 
copying the eighteenth century masters whose 
beauties were revealed to him by his artistic 
temperament. 

L’Eclair, Oct. 25, 1906 (Rene-Marc Ferry) : 
. . . An incomplete talent, whose imperfect 
vision kept his work undeveloped and always in 
the state of a sketch. Thanks to the perversity 


Paul Cezanne 


203 

of certain writers and the artifices of certain 
(dealers he cut a brave figure as a great man and 
a chef d’ecole. 

Le Soleil , Oct. 25, 1905: . . . Cezanne was 
a very fine man, highly esteemed by all who 
knew him, but a very incomplete artist. They 
tried to make a master of him, but their efforts 
were unsuccessful; the public would not give 
the stamp of its approval to an infatuation which 
had nothing to justify it. The most admirable 
thing in the life of “Father Cezanne” was his per¬ 
severance in painting badly. 

Journal de Monaco , Oct. 30, 1906: . . . Ce¬ 
zanne forced himself to paint people, landscapes 
and still-lifes just as he saw them, without trou¬ 
bling himself about imparting to them a little 
beauty. Faces, trees, flowers, fruit, or furniture 
were bungled with the same brutality. 

Bulletin de VArt Ancien et Moderne , Nov. 3, 
1906: . . . Cezanne was accepted as a mas¬ 
ter by a group of the younger generation who 
tried to make him out a chef d'ecole. As for the 


204 


Paul Cezanne 


public, it never ceased being disconcerted by this 
sincere but incomplete artist’s weakness in draw¬ 
ing. 

La Revue des Beaux-Arts , Nov. 11, 1906 
(Fagus) : . . . Dare I say that he had as much 

genius as a savage. . . . 

L’ Art et les Artistes , November, 1906 (Guille¬ 
mot) : . . . Some go as far as to pretend that 
he was a man of genius; business reasons alone 
might justify such an exaggeration. 

Art et Decoration , November, 1906 (Mau- 
clair) : When Cezanne was alive, certain things 
might be said of him. Over his fresh closed 
grave it but becomes me to admit with regret 
that I was never able to discover the reasons for 
his influence, and to add a tribute to the modest 
good-will of this persevering and ill-starred art¬ 
ist. 

Mercure de France , Feb. 15, 1907 (Charles 
Morice compares Gauguin’s exile in Tahiti with 
Cezanne’s voluntary seclusion at Aix) : 

“Gauguin’s exile was not the gesture of a man 
separating himself from his kind. ... In avoid- 


Paul Cezanne 


205 

in^ a 'false semblance of civilization/ far from 
turning away from life, he found it. . . . 

‘'Cezanne, cloistered within the strict limits of 
the technique of his art, living by his eye and 
brain alone, strikes us as the prototype of the 
one-track mind, egotistically incurious about all 
that did not have to do with tones and the rela¬ 
tions of tones—a magnificent monster/’ 

Le Feu , May,, 1912 (Joachim Gasquet) : . . . 
He possessed the accurate mysticism of reality, 
and his torment was to render life yet more liv¬ 
ing. He sits himself down in the corner of a 
tavern, drinks a finger of heavy wine, and slowly 
the soul of Shakespeare, which haunts him, 
weaves a romantic drama out of the uncouth con¬ 
verse of the peasants. A wisp of a girl, like an 
elusive ignis fatuus , trips along the edge of the 
ever open grave which follows his stumbling foot¬ 
steps, and into which, as soon as ecstasy comes, 
vanish the misty remains of his cares. A motif 
springs into being. 


THE END 


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